Creating a program that polls a website...

Hey all, I'm trying to create a very unique and seemingly odd program.

Basically what I want to do is create a program which polls a website frequently (every 15 minutes or so) and analyses the content (which is ever changing). If there is a change, it will send out a notice (via email, or perhaps even va text message) to alert me.

I have a strong knowledge of computers, but limited programming (I have 2 semesters of java programming, learned Q basic, and worked extensively with mathlab/mathcad). I basicaly need the beginning building blocks and can work on sorting things out once I have a shell, but getting the shell I have no idea where to go. I've never created a program from scratch really that just launches (except with java and SDK environments a long time ago).

Does anyone have any good starting references?

Thanks,
Aaron

"Beautiful Soup" python module for checking the website, and how you want to be notified would be a big factor in what programming language / plugin you would want to use for that bit.

You don't need an app for that

Just use If Then Then That's Feed to Email (or Feed to SMS). If the page has no RSS feed, use Page2RSS.

That IFTTT is exactly what I'm looking for but it needs to access HTML and more of a customizable search.

I seem to have hit a wall anyway as the website no longer is updating for some reason.