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Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS

sitespy.app

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Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS

#41

Post by Symbiote »

tene80i wrote: post #14

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.

I added my employer's website RSS feed to the all-staff Slack channel. I find it useful, I don't know about others but no one has grumbled.

https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/218688467-Add-RSS...

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS

#42

Post by vkuprin »

OSaMaBiNLoGiN wrote: post #40

Tool looks useful. But how is it that toggling between light/dark mode results in a multi-second freeze..? Scrolling drops frames, confirmed with dev tools. Tested on m1 pro 2021 laptop and recent higher-end (4080, 14700k, etc) desktop. Same on both. The fuck?

Yeah, that was a real bug — CSS transitions on the body were blocking the thread during theme switches. I pushed a fix for it earlier today. Should be smooth now, but let me know if you still see it

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS

#43

Post by vkuprin »

nicbou wrote: post #38
vkuprin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German laws and bureaucracy pages are exactly the kind of thing where tracking one specific part of a page is much more useful than watching the whole page. And yeah, more control over check frequency makes a lot of sense if monthly checks are enough and rate limits are the main problem. I’d be curious what kind of schedule would work best for you there?

Monthly is fine, but not monthly all at once , because I watch multiple pages on one website, and that triggers the rate limiting. The ideal pipeline for me would be "notice a change in a specific part of a page, use a very small LLM to extract a value or answer a question, update a constant in a file and make a pull request". I've been thinking about this pipeline for a long time because my work depends on it, but n…

You can already work around the rate-limit issue today — there's a global minimum recheck interval in Settings that spreads checks out across time. Not per-site throttling yet, but it prevents one domain from getting hit too many times at once.

The pipeline you described — detect a change, extract a value with a small LLM, open a PR — is pretty much exactly what the MCP server is designed for. Connect Site Spy to Claude or Cursor, and when a specific part of a page changes, the agent can handle the extraction and PR automatically. I don't think anyone has wired up that exact flow yet, but all the pieces exist.

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS

#46

Post by vkuprin »

pentagrama wrote: post #44

That looks nice, I use the free plan of https://visualping.io for some software changelogs, RSS feeds are a paid feature. Will check this out.

Yeah, RSS is free on all plans — it felt like a core feature, not an upsell

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS

#48

Post by hinkley »

deceptionatd wrote: post #37
hinkley wrote: post #15

Back in 2000 I worked for a company that was trying to turn something like this into the foundation for a search engine. 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 work…

Well-designed sitemaps and use of something like https://www.indexnow.org/ helps. Cloudflare has Crawler Hints which works well IME: https://blog.cloudflare.com/crawler-hints-how-cloudflare-is-...

Do you know if cloudfront has anything like this?

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS

#49

Post by csto12 »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #20

As a (former) reporter, site monitoring is a big part of what I do on a daily basis and I used many, many such services. 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 call…

What do you do now if you don’t mind sharing?

Re: Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS

#50

Post by bharrison »

Calls to mind a long forgotten, and perhaps one of the most useful bash scripts I've written which addressed this issue in a very rudimentary way; Curl a url, hash the result to file, compare the current hash to the saved hash from the previous run and generate an email on diff.

My goal was to monitor the online release of tickets for the 2009 Scion Rock fest (luckily no js, or even Adobe Flash[!] in use), and it worked brilliantly to that end.

[grammar]

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