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Very good! This is something that existed in the past and I used successfully, but services like this tend to disappear
I like https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io for this. Open source and free to run locally or use their Saas service.
Nice will try this out!
I like https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io for this. Open source and free to run locally or use their Saas service.
There's also https://github.com/thp/urlwatch/ - (not aware of any SaaS offer - self-hosted it is).
Essentially instead of having a bunch of search engines and AI spamming your site, the idea was that they would get a feed. You would essentially scan your own website.
As crawlers grew from an occasional visitor to an actual problem (an inordinate percent of all consumer traffic at the SaaS I worked for was bots rather than organic traffic, and would have been more without throttling) I keep wondering why we haven’t done this.
Google has already solved the problem of people lying about their content, because RSS feeds or user agent sniffing you can still provide false witness to your site’s content and purpose. But you’d only have to be scanned when there was something to see. And really you could play games with time delays on the feed to smear out bot traffic over the day if you wanted.
I like https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io for this. Open source and free to run locally or use their Saas service.
I like https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io for this. Open source and free to run locally or use their Saas service.
Yep, changedetection.io is a good project. With Site Spy, I wanted to make the browser-first workflow much easier: install the extension, connect it to the dashboard, click the exact part of the page you care about, and then follow changes as diffs, history, or RSS with very little setup. I can definitely see why the open-source / self-hosted route is appealing too.
RSS is a useful interface, but: "Do most people just want direct alerts?" Yes, of course. RSS is beloved but niche. Depends who your target audience is. I personally would want an email, because that's how I get alerts about other things. RSS to me is for long form reading, not notifications I must notice. The answer to any product question like this totally depends on your audience and their normal routines.
you used to have native RSS support in browsers, and latest articles automatically in your bookmarks bar.
I can attest that, at least from the landing page, this seems to be a very good execution of the concept, especially the text-based diffing to easily spot what changed and, most importantly, how.
The biggest hurdle for such apps however are 'js-based browser-rendered sites' or whatever they're called nowadays. How does Site Spy handle such abominations?