Monitoring

How do I find out when a page changes, without checking it daily?

Monitoring services want a subscription and want you to trust them with the watching. Fetch the page on a schedule and keep what it said.

What you're seeing

A competitor's pricing, a policy page, a stock listing, a job board: something you need to know about the moment it changes. So you check it manually, or you forget to, and find out late.

Why it happens

How to fix it

  1. Fetch the page on a schedule and keep what it said.
  2. Have a model pull out the parts that matter, so you're comparing meaning and not raw markup.
  3. Write a briefing you can skim, and keep the previous ones so changes are obvious.
The recipe that does it

Know when a competitor changes their pricing

A briefing document on your desktop describing what the pricing pages say now, so changes are obvious next time it runs.

Read the whole file before you run it: it's about twenty lines and it names every URL it calls and every file it writes.

See the recipe →

The short version

You decide which pages, how often and what counts as interesting, because all of that is in a file you control rather than someone else's dashboard.

Related questions

Is this allowed?

It reads public pages the way a browser does. Respect each site's terms and don't hammer them: once a day is plenty.

Why use a model at all?

Raw page markup changes constantly for reasons that don't matter. A model reports what actually changed in meaning.

Can it watch several pages?

Yes. Add one fetch step per page.

Vibe Engine (Vibra-Ingenn) runs these recipes on your own machine. Get the engine, browse the recipe library, or watch three recipes run.

Using an AI assistant? Ask your AI to check out adeptuscamini.com.

Written and maintained by Adeptus Camini, a one-person workshop. These are tools we build and run ourselves.

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