You are imagining things.

The experienced monks are just good in reading RAT titles, and telling if it's interesting by judging the participants. At least that's what I do.

> without having to continuously re-roll the Perlmonks website scraping,

There are no triggers that you can set like in an email filter.

But you don't exactly need website scrapping if you parse the XML feeds.

So indeed you could poll some meta XML tickers and XML views of posts like ?displaytype=xml;node_id=1196487 to parse if your name "StevieB" or keywords were mentioned.

Updates

Since there are also some RSS Feeds you might find a ready to use tool to get alarms for your keywords.

Concerning CSS, there are many classes available to highlight special monks in RAT View.

I'm only using it to highlight me and hiding others.

But that's not what you're after, I'm afraid.