ChangeDetection, monitor any website change

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s no email signup. What they consider a &#x27;newsletter&#x27; is in fact a list of PDFs hosted on their site.)<p>And that&#x27;s federal gov contracting. State&#x2F;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&#x27;m OP. I&#x27;m not the developer of the project, but I think it deserved a post on HN because it&#x27;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.

First time I&#x27;ve noticed a GH repo having so much SEO in the About section! Not sure how I feel about it..

I&#x27;ve been self-hosting this for a year or so and it&#x27;s pretty neat.<p>It happens quite often that I need to wait for something which doesn&#x27;t have a builtin alert.<p>Currently I&#x27;m for example using it to get an alert when a flutter package has been updated on pub.dev

I&#x27;ve used <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;urlwatch.readthedocs.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;visualping.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;visualping.io</a> does a nice similar job and is free for moderate personal use.

Curious how this handles sites behind CloudFlare using bot detection.

Kudos, this is a very feature rich solution. I like it. 8.99 seems a little bit much, but I guess it&#x27;s probably the sweet spot on the curve.

Here&#x27;s an addon for Firefox that also checks websites in regular intervals to detect changes:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WaldiPL&#x2F;webpageScanner">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WaldiPL&#x2F;webpageScanner</a><p>Not affiliated with it and I don&#x27;t know if it still works, haven&#x27;t used it lately. When I used it, it worked to my satisfaction.

my favorite one is visualping.io

Interesting! I&#x27;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&#x27;ll give it a try,.

How does this handle A&#x2F;B tests that sites are running?

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

Anyone has been utilized this tool to monitoring Amazon Prices (with login)?