Detect When a Website Changes With Visualping
Webhooks to know when something changes that you care about
Cover Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash
There have been days where I visit a website very often to see the latest movies added. I always check whether there have been any new additions. I Googled and found out quite a few blog posts on using python scripts to detect changes in websites. As a Software Engineer myself, I said to myself, "why not give it a try".
But as we all know, developers are lazy. We love to implement solutions that already exist than to write things from scratch. Out of curiosity, before getting my hands dirty, I was wondering whether there is an online service or browser extension that does this.
This is how I discovered Visualping. The best part is that this allowed me to fully automate the task with very little or no coding knowledge at all.
What Is Visualping?
This is an automated website change detection monitoring tool. You simply enter the website to monitor, select the area to keep track of and are notified when there is a change in the selected area.
There are three options for detecting changes.
- Visual compare - The system takes a snapshot of the area selected and compares it with the snapshot of the same area previously taken.
- Web compare - An element of the page is selected to be tracked. The system monitors and compares the HTML code, not pixels.
- Text compare - This will track the entire page and sends you an email alert highlighting what was removed in red and what was added in green.
Screenshot of Visualping by Author
Notifications
When a change is detected, you are notified via email. In addition to this, you are able to integrate notifications directly into:
Use Cases
- I came across a tweet where an individual managed to purchase a ticket for a fully-booked concert moments after the lines were open. He used Visualping to detect the changes and wrote a Python script to purchase the tickets.
- Recruiters use this tool to detect changes in a candidate's profile.
- Some software engineers use this tool to monitor software update release pages.
- Or you can be a lazy guy like me, trying to automate repetitive things that take more than two minutes of your time. I integrated a Telegram bot into my application to get the notifications directly in my Telegram app.
The messages received from my telegram bot
Conclusion
This powerful tool can be used as a fun starter project as well as a complex business tool. There are several more use cases that I have not mentioned above.
You can visit the official Visualping website to know more. Although this might sound new to someone, it is already being used by a lot of people, and they do find it helpful.
Never be afraid to try something new! Happy learning!
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