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App that tracks webpage for changes?

generik

generik

macrumors 601
Original poster
Aug 5, 2005
4,116
1
Minitrue
I've been trying to find such an app for MacOS, and the closest one I found is Dejal Simon.

Unfortunately Dejal Simon seems to be targetted towards a different kind of customer and the $159 price tag just to have unlimited slot for websites is not acceptable :mad:

Is there any other nifty and cheap tool that you'd use for this? Thanks!
 
I'm looking for the same thing. Website Watcher on the PC is one of my favorite apps.



generik said:
I've been trying to find such an app for MacOS, and the closest one I found is Dejal Simon.

Unfortunately Dejal Simon seems to be targetted towards a different kind of customer and the $159 price tag just to have unlimited slot for websites is not acceptable :mad:

Is there any other nifty and cheap tool that you'd use for this? Thanks!
Click to expand...
 
Spec it out a bit! What are you looking for? You supply some URLs and the app periodically looks at that URL to see if it's changed and alerts you in some way?

That sounds pretty easy to write... (not that I have the time, but who cares!)
 
robbieduncan said:
Spec it out a bit! What are you looking for? You supply some URLs and the app periodically looks at that URL to see if it's changed and alerts you in some way?

That sounds pretty easy to write... (not that I have the time, but who cares!)
Click to expand...

Basically that's it. Yeah it is not that hard to write! :rolleyes:
 
generik said:
Basically that's it. Yeah it is not that hard to write! :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

OK but what do you mean by "changes". The easy way (which is about all I'd be willing to do for the moment) is to download the URL to a file. Then every x minutes/seconds/whatever download it again and run a diff on the 2 files. This means if ANYTHING changes it will be registered as a change. If the site uses server side adds then and an add changed you'd see it as a change.

Edit to add: also what OS support? 10.3+?
 
Well I've made a good start on my distraction from writing the next release of Poster Paint. I honestly thought I'd have a really rough 0.0.0 version to post tonight but I've spent so long getting the UI to do what I want it's not ready yet.

If you need something in the meantime there appears to be a widget to do this. Do a search for Website Monitor on Version Tracker.
 
I think Netscape and/or Mozilla had this as a feature. You could subscribe to some of your bookmarked sites and get a message if they changed... Just don't remember when I used it last or when it went away (if ever).
 
robbieduncan said:
Well I've made a good start on my distraction from writing the next release of Poster Paint. I honestly thought I'd have a really rough 0.0.0 version to post tonight but I've spent so long getting the UI to do what I want it's not ready yet.

If you need something in the meantime there appears to be a widget to do this. Do a search for Website Monitor on Version Tracker.
Click to expand...

Not so much a change of specs, but a feature request! :)

It'd be nice if the app would actually keep track of sucessive changes to a webpage and provide some indication to the user what changed when (ie: at <time> these changes were made since last snapshop), and also, a really good feature to have would be having it trigger only when specific changes occur (ie: text between "US$" and "Buy it now"). That'd at least solve the issue of dynamic pages being "changed" all the time!
 
Mitthrawnuruodo said:
I think Netscape and/or Mozilla had this as a feature. You could subscribe to some of your bookmarked sites and get a message if they changed... Just don't remember when I used it last or when it went away (if ever).
Click to expand...

Unfortunately I use Camino a lot these days, and it doesn't seem like Cammy has as good a feature set as Mozilla.
 
generik said:
Not so much a change of specs, but a feature request! :)

It'd be nice if the app would actually keep track of sucessive changes to a webpage and provide some indication to the user what changed when (ie: at <time> these changes were made since last snapshop), and also, a really good feature to have would be having it trigger only when specific changes occur (ie: text between "US$" and "Buy it now"). That'd at least solve the issue of dynamic pages being "changed" all the time!
Click to expand...

That's the sort of thing I was expecting to be asked when I was asking above. I don't intend doing that right now as it requires the app to actually understand HTML. I can't even reliably get the text in human readable form due to character encoding issues at the moment!
 
Just to let you know I'm still working on this. I've managed to get the source code downloading issue sorted (so the HTML is available regardless of encoding) by using WebKit to download the page for me. Maybe I'll manage to get a rough 0.0.0 version out soon...
 
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