I have a professor who randomly updates his website with homework due tomorrow and seems to expect us to check it every hour.
This sounds like a job for a program.
His website is simple and entirely html, not even any javascript. How could I programatically detect any changes/updates to his website?
Fetch and md5 the content of each page. Then store and compare with previous values. Note that this is sensitive down to the character level.
Alternativelly, setup a Google Alert for site:your-professors-website.com and have the updates delivered to your email or via rss.
setup a cron job to periodically wget or curl the URL, then grep for relevant text, then send yourself an email if interesting results are found...