Comments on: How can I get an email alert when a web page changes?

Question: How can I get an email alert when a web page changes?

tamagosan — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:27:22 -0800

I need to automatically refresh a web page and be alerted via email (or run an applescript) when it changes.

There are a few commercial apps that do this, but they're Windows based and I'm on a Mac. I'd also prefer something that's freeware. There's also a couple Firefox add-ons which will automatically check a page for changes, but none that I've found allow for an email alert (or to run an applescript).

By: plasticbugs

plasticbugs — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:00:53 -0800

Check out Change Detection. I think it will do exactly what you need.

By: mysterious1der

mysterious1der — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:08:56 -0800

Page2RSS teamed up with either RSSFwd or Feedblitz

By: tamagosan

tamagosan — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:16:49 -0800

Unfortunately, those won't work. I have to automatically refresh the page to stay logged into the site.

By: Jeff Howard

Jeff Howard — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 12:45:04 -0800

Internet Explorer allows you to subscribe to a page as a Favorite, check it on a specific schedule, and e-mail you if there are changes. It's super easy if you can dig up an old Mac version of IE, and a little more hidden on the PC (you could run it under Parallels).

My other idea if that doesn't work is to use Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Get someone to manually check the page for you two or three times a day.

By: nicwolff

nicwolff — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 14:03:18 -0800

Run this every few minutes or whatever from cron:

curl -s http://example.com -b session_id=DEADBEEF | md5 | tee new - | diff -q - old || echo 'example.com has changed' | mail -s 'IT CHANGED!' your@address.com && mv new old && osascript /path/to/your/AppleScript

Replace http://example.com with the URL you need to watch, "session_id=DEADBEEF" with whatever cookie name and value your browser has stored for that site, and your@address.com with your e-mail address.

By: nicwolff

nicwolff — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 14:05:14 -0800

Oh, you should run curl -s http://example.com -b session_id=DEADBEEF | md5 > old first to avoid getting an error the first time it checks.