Wednesday 25 September 2013

Get Email Alerts When a Web Page Changes

Monitor Web Pages for Changes
VisualPing.io is a new web app that lets you monitor web pages and it sends an email alert when it detect any change in the content of the page. Unlike other web-based change detection tools, Visual Ping is easier to setup and completely free.
It takes 3 easy steps to monitor a web page as illustrated in this screenshot.
Enter the web address (URL) of a web page and Visual Ping will create a screenshot image of that page. You can create a selection anywhere on that page using your mouse and enter your email address. The service will monitor that particular area of the page every hour and whenever it detects a change, it will send you before and after screenshots of the specified area.
I have been testing the service for the last two days against several popular websites – including CNN and nytimes.com that are updated very frequently – and VisualPing.io does seem like a useful service. The email alerts arrive on time and the included before-n-after screenshots images are sharp and clear.

Changes Detected by Visual Ping

CNN - After     CNN - Before
And while we are on the topic of change detection, I highly recommend the Page Monitor add-on for Chrome or you can build your own page monitor with Google Docs.
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Google Docs does require some knowledge of XPath while in the case of Page Monitor, you can visually selected DOM Nodes on a page to add them to your monitor queue. The add-on will also highlight changes in pages that have been modified.

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