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Looks cool. I wanted to build a service that would monitor an external web page for me and notify me about content changes. The problem was that it was consta

Looks cool. I wanted to build a service that would monitor an external web page for me and notify me about content changes. The problem was that it was constantly detecting changes with ads or menus or stuff not related to the content itself (which is what I was interested in). Didn't have time to get it going any further. One use case for me was to monitor the Washington State traffic laws (or all RCWs if needed) and get notified when changes were published (with a diff that I could actually read, as opposed to just the URL with the change on it). I've found over the years that the laws were being changed in very small ways (like a 1 character diff, like changing "2" days to "5" days, giving LEOs more time to file traffic tickets with the court, or just a few letters, like changing "may" to "must" (requiring judges to dismiss tickets not filed in a timely manner as opposed to giving them the option).

jmtulloss 11y ago
I recently discovered http://visualping.io/ http://visualping.io/, which does a good job of this.
michaelstewart 11y ago
An automatically curated list of changes made to various state and federal laws would be super cool. I remember reading a NYT article [1] that highlights the need for something like this to monitor changes that are being made to supreme court rulings years after they are issued. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-isnt-supreme-court-keeps-editing.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-is...
archagon 11y ago
I've been recently looking for something similar to this as well, but haven't found the perfect product for me yet. Ideally, it would be an application or service where you would add URLs to monitor (perhaps with a list of ids/classes), where for each website, you'd get a long list of changes (timestamped) going back to when you added it, along with the option to diff each change against the current version.
notgood 11y ago
With CasperJS and a CSS selector it would be easy to do, a few lines actually: https://gist.github.com/Ivanca/aef2e58dbbf9eb3e1bd4 https://gist.github.com/Ivanca/aef2e58dbbf9eb3e1bd4
logicalmike 11y ago
I personally use the Page Monitor chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-monitor/pemhgklkefakciniebenbfclihhmmfcd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-monitor/pemhg... It also has Selector functionality (in addition to full-page monitoring), which let's you explicitly choose which elements on the page to monitor for changes.

jmtulloss 11y ago

I recently discovered http://visualping.io/ http://visualping.io/, which does a good job of this.

michaelstewart 11y ago

An automatically curated list of changes made to various state and federal laws would be super cool. I remember reading a NYT article [1] that highlights the need for something like this to monitor changes that are being made to supreme court rulings years after they are issued. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-isnt-supreme-court-keeps-editing.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-is...

archagon 11y ago

I've been recently looking for something similar to this as well, but haven't found the perfect product for me yet. Ideally, it would be an application or service where you would add URLs to monitor (perhaps with a list of ids/classes), where for each website, you'd get a long list of changes (timestamped) going back to when you added it, along with the option to diff each change against the current version.

notgood 11y ago

With CasperJS and a CSS selector it would be easy to do, a few lines actually: https://gist.github.com/Ivanca/aef2e58dbbf9eb3e1bd4 https://gist.github.com/Ivanca/aef2e58dbbf9eb3e1bd4

logicalmike 11y ago

I personally use the Page Monitor chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-monitor/pemhgklkefakciniebenbfclihhmmfcd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-monitor/pemhg... It also has Selector functionality (in addition to full-page monitoring), which let's you explicitly choose which elements on the page to monitor for changes.