A few years ago when I was a Junior engineer, I worked for a company which would provide us with free tickets to any sports team in our city. I'm not a sports fan, but my stepdad loves hockey. When the tickets went up, they got reserved pretty fast.<p>I noticed that the site we used to reserve the tickets had a predictable slug like: `{company}-hockey-tickets-2016-season`, and `{company}-hockey-tickets-2015-season`. The sites also didn't change between each refresh.<p>So, when it was nearly time for the 2017 season to start, I wrote a script which hashed a GET request of the site at `{company}-hockey-tickets-2017-season`. If the hash changed, it would send me a text message using twilio, and I would know to immediately get on a machine and reserve the tickets we wanted. After a couple false positives, the page eventually went up before it was announced and I reserved the tickets I wanted.<p>Unfortunately, the office manager who did these things told me I couldn't jump the gun and un-reserved my tickets. After the official announcement went up, the spots I had originally reserved quickly went to someone else
Good stuff. Niche idea for ya: consider government contractors. Gov sites tend to be atrocious. Manual change tracking can mean you find a $1M RFP weeks earlier, which increases chance of winning. (Consider mda.mil. There's no email signup. What they consider a 'newsletter' is in fact a list of PDFs hosted on their site.)<p>And that's federal gov contracting. State/local is even more of a Wild West. So much so that many, maany companies just never have the bandwidth to even find RFPs and navigate those ancient sites.
I'm OP. I'm not the developer of the project, but I think it deserved a post on HN because it's pretty an useful tool to track website changes. Setup can be done in a few minutes and the lead developer is always looking for solid feedbacks.
I've been self-hosting this for a year or so and it's pretty neat.<p>It happens quite often that I need to wait for something which doesn't have a builtin alert.<p>Currently I'm for example using it to get an alert when a flutter package has been updated on pub.dev
I've used <a href="https://urlwatch.readthedocs.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://urlwatch.readthedocs.io</a> but this definitely seems much easier to use—though possibly not quite as powerful regarding page filtering. But at least ChangeDetection supports jq which is already quite a nice feature in that department.
<a href="https://visualping.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://visualping.io</a> does a nice similar job and is free for moderate personal use.
Here's an addon for Firefox that also checks websites in regular intervals to detect changes:<p><a href="https://github.com/WaldiPL/webpageScanner">https://github.com/WaldiPL/webpageScanner</a><p>Not affiliated with it and I don't know if it still works, haven't used it lately. When I used it, it worked to my satisfaction.
Interesting! I've been making some scripts privately for specific tasks, like an Nvidia video card I wanted to buy. However many sites are really hostile to scraping these days. I'll give it a try,.
I have used it for some time now. It has been very useful for me.<p>Some use cases for me:<p>* price changes<p>* calendar changes for sport events<p>* document changes for local gov<p>* new firmware releases<p>* terms of conditions changes