watchpage.pl

Since the excellent mindit! service went commercial I thought I'd see how hard it could really be to keep an eye on web pages. Here's the result - watchpage.pl is a very simple perl script that uses lynx(1) to check the latest version of your favourite web pages. If it it finds a change it prints a message to stdout and stores the latest content in ~/.watchpage.

watchpage.pl requires no fancy perl modules - just the stock standard distribution as installed on eg. Linux. It relies on lynx(1) for downloading the pages.

It would be easy to put the hotlist into a separate file and use a GUI to edit it but I'll leave that to someone else. I find that editing watchpage.pl itself is just as easy.

2. Download

Here it is: watchpage.pl

3. Installation

Just put watchpage.pl somewhere convenient (perhaps /usr/local/bin) and chmod a+x

4. How to Use

I put watchpage into crontab(1) to execute every morning before I get to work with a line like:

40 5 * * * /usr/local/bin/watchpage.pl

cron(8) sends the output to me by email.

You could also put watchpage.pl into the dialup startup script eg. /etc/ppp/ip-up.local so you can check your pages whenever you connect to the web.

5. Enhancement opportunities

The hotlist should be separated from the program - perhaps into ~/.watchpage/hotlist - then every user can have their own version (on a multiuser system)
The hotlist could use a Tcl/Tk or other GUI editor put together for it.
watchpage.pl does not look at the modification date in the HTTP header. Perhaps it could use this information - at present it is purely content-based.
Perhaps watchpage.pl should create an HTML page (in ~/.watchpage with links to all the new stuff?

6. Caveats

watchpage.pl only looks at the text contents of the URL. Obviously pages that change every time you look at them (eg. with a date field) may produce gratuitous hits.

watchpage.pl won't pick up changes in non-text elements such as graphics.

I haven't even begun to think about security considerations.

7. Bug fixes

Greatly appreciated!

8. Licence

GPL

This page last updated on Sat Dec 21 18:12:37 EST 2002

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