from Hacker News

WatchMe – Watch for Changes on a Page

by Bilters on 4/26/19, 3:18 PM with 35 comments

  • by diehunde on 4/26/19, 5:31 PM

    A couple of weeks ago I was listening to a podcast and the guest worked at this data integration company. In order to provide integration with external APIs they needed to do this in case they changed any endpoint without backwards compatibility. They would monitor the API docs for any change so they could see if something had to be updated on their side. I thought it was kind of "brute" but then I realized there's no good way of doing this today.
  • by soared on 4/26/19, 5:55 PM

    This looks cool, but it seems like a great example of when a gui would be better than a command line.
  • by peterdemin on 4/26/19, 9:50 PM

    Very much like kibitzr https://kibitzr.github.io/ I like your use cases though.
  • by 1bent on 4/27/19, 2:16 PM

    I use the similar (in concept) android app Web Alert https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.webalert which pops up notifications when a chosen part of a web page changes; I've configured it to watch for updates to all of Randy Harmelink's newly free kindle ebook lists at Ogre's Crypt.
  • by jarfil on 4/26/19, 4:05 PM

    How is this different from urlwatch?
  • by Jerry2 on 4/26/19, 6:08 PM

    Wasn't there a website that would send you diffs of a webpage too? I remember using something like this to keep tracks of updates to a blog without RSS...
  • by exhilaration on 4/26/19, 7:14 PM

    Another option is https://visualping.io/ which I've used several times.
  • by arendtio on 4/26/19, 7:13 PM

    Sometimes I am surprised how much time some people invest in building tools for use-cases that can easily be achieved with ubiquitous cli tools. I have a handful of scripts which are triggered by cron jobs / systemd timers and notify me via XMPP.

    The only thing that is not present on a normal Linux system is the xmppsend [1] command for which I use a simple go binary that can easily be deployed.

    [1] https://github.com/arendtio/xmppsend

  • by ysw0 on 4/27/19, 2:19 AM

    Very interesting!
  • by federiconbo on 4/26/19, 7:00 PM

    piece of work!