Show HN: Sleeping Spider – Web page change monitor(sleepingspider.com) |
Show HN: Sleeping Spider – Web page change monitor(sleepingspider.com) |
Does it render javascript content (so e.g. <div ng-view> angular sites work)?
Does it exclude or include comments... if I watch a blogpost with comments will every new comment cause an alert or only blogpost changes?
Will I get a notification if the page briefly 500 errors when you hit it, or does it have to get a 200 before it reports a change?
Will I get a notification if a page disappears entirely?
Does it scrape only once per day or more often and alert only once a day?
What user-agent does it scrape from on the off-chance someone wants to block it?
Does it diff binary data.. for example, if I ask it to watch an image url will it hash the image and notify me when it gets updated?
Does it auto-detect pages with rss feeds or pubsub feeds and subscribe to them?
Does it understand twitter so if I watch a user, it only alerts me of tweets, not e.g. a change in the number of followers?
Does it have special code for any website whatsoever?
Is the webpage parsing/diffing library / algorithm open source somewhere?
Is there a monitization plan, and if not how can I trust it won't vanish?
Is there a limit on the number of sites I can watch?
I like the simplistic design, but it would be nice if there were more information.
See https://sleepingspider.com/faqs for most answers.
It's an early product launch. I have no monetization plan. Too early to plan that.
In the current phase I want to figure out does people like it and how do people use it, how to make it better and serves more people.
;D
I mean no offense, but I assume you're not a native English speaker based on that FAQ. I've taken the liberty of rewording them to sound more natural: http://pastebin.com/Kxti3KP0
Whether or not you take any of my suggestions or not, I at least recommend throwing it through a spellchecker.
I find this a bizarre response to a simple and easy to understand tool.
Therefore, I personally find this list of questions very relevant. Some of those questions I was asking myself when looking at the page. The fact that this information wasn't clear from the website itself is also important. At least some of the users of such tool would most likely want to know what to expect.
Perhaps it could have been asked in a more positive way (not entirely sure how, but maybe explaining why those things matter), but the questions themselves are important and I'd be curious to know the answers.
I don't think "go write your own" is a legitimate response to my questions (if that's ever a legitimate response).
edit: as did the 3rd. And 0 bytes returned so probably being blocked. On a black list already?
https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Nexus_6_32GB_C...
For my use case, anything more than an hour delay wouldn't be practical. Ideally it would be up to the minute, but I'd imagine that would cause other issues for a service like this. In the past I just used a Chrome Extension. But living in Vietnam I have to make sure my VPN is up in order to see the North American content.
I was not aware of this situation before. I will see what I can do.
What do you think if I provide a numeric filter option to watches, which filters out numbers on the page before comparing if turned on.
I don't have a good solution for this problem yet. Let the user specify a css selector or xpath?
Can you elaborate in what case you might want to do this?
I feel a children's book coming out of this.
Change <h1> to <h2> will not trigger an alert.
For a while I had a webapp to do a better job but it never got any traction, most likely because I had no idea how to get traction. It's an interesting exercise to write such a tool though.
Personally I don't use twitter neither. Email me if you need to contact.