How to keep monitoring a website – Web Slices in IE 8

Is there an easy way to do a preview of a website and/or have your browser automatically scan for updates to the site?  In Internet Explorer 8, there is a new add-on technology called Web Slices..  If a website has created a web slice, you can load it into your browser and it will notify you when it has scanned the site.  Quoting from the Microsoft site:

How many times a day do you check for updates to e-mail, weather reports, sports scores, stock quotes, auction items email and so on? Until now this was a manual process, where you had to repeatedly visit sites to check for updates or new information.

Using Web Slices, you can keep up with frequently updated sites directly from the new Favorites Bar. If a Web Slice is available on a page, a green Web Slices icon will appear in the Command Bar. Click on this icon to easily subscribe and add the Web Slices to the Favorites Bar so you can keep track of that “slice” of the web.

When new information becomes available, the Web Slice will become highlighted. When you click on the Web Slice in the Favorites Bar, it previews relevant information. Clicking on the preview takes you directly to the site for more information.

So how do you find web slices?

One way to find web slices is to go to the Microsoft Add-ons gallery and pick one from there.

The other way, is to have the browser inform you when there is a web slice and then click on it.

If a site has web slices, there will be a little green squares on the web page that you can click on to install the web slice.  This is an ESPN page that has web slices on it.

You will also see the web slice icon on the command bar.  You can click on the arrow and choose a web slice to install.

When you click to install a web slice, the following dialog box will appear:

How Web Slices work

Once you install a web slice, they will appear in your favorites bar (in this snapshot, I have installed the ESPN NFL snapshot).  If you click on the arrow for the snapshot, a preview window will come up.

At the bottom of the window on the lower left, you see an arrow.  If you click on it, it will bring up the full webpage that the web slice is on.

How do you modify and delete web slices?

If you put your mouse over the web slice and right click the mouse, you can choose the properties option.  That will bring up the following dialog box:

If you choose the delete option from the right click mouse menu, it will delete the web slice.