webdiff - Get an email when a website changes

The Compiler · 2014-05-08 14:14:29

webdiff is a small and (IMHO) really handy utility which I coded because I was tired of checking websites which don't provide RSS feeds manually.

It's a simple 80-line bash script which gets the webpages, uses elinks to render them, then uses diff to figure out how many characters changed and sends a mail with mailx if the change is over a given threshold.

To use it, simply create two files:

~/.webdiff/pages with a <threshold> <url> line per page, like this (this is my current file):

1 http://ocr4linux.com/
1 http://www.cmpl.cc/test.html
1 https://sites.google.com/site/sleepasandroid/beta-release/
20 https://www.digitec.ch/Tagesaktionen.aspx
1 http://www.riverbankcomputing.com/news
1 https://www.mtgox.com/
1 http://pebblebits.com/

~/.webdiff/mail with a mail address in it to send updates to.

You also have to be able to send mails via mailx, if you simply want to use a provider, set up msmtpd.

Then get webdiff from the git repository and start it periodically in a cronjob. As soon as something changed compared to the previous run, you should get notified.

Let me know what you think!

Flo

ninian · 2014-05-08 17:36:40

Lazy me, I just use ChangeDetection myself.

The Compiler · 2014-05-08 20:05:04

Haha, nice!

I was searching for a linux tool which did this (and was surprised nothing existed it seems), but it didn't occur to me there could be a web service for that.

Arch Linux

#1 2014-05-08 14:14:29

webdiff - Get an email when a website changes

#2 2014-05-08 17:36:40

Re: webdiff - Get an email when a website changes

#3 2014-05-08 20:05:04

Re: webdiff - Get an email when a website changes

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