Let’s say, you need to monitor a website for changes and you really don’t have a lot of time to set things up. Also solving the problem with money using services, such as changedetection.io (https://changedetection.io/) or visualping.io (https://visualping.io/), have failed you, because their accesses are probably filtered out.

I’ve come up with the following scrappy solution. First, I want to get push notifications to my phone. So I installed simplepush (https://simplepush.io/) on my phone. There are a couple of these services, this was just the first I found and it works well.

I have a couple of Linux servers. So I just logged in to one, installed ntfy (https://github.com/dschep/ntfy) and the Links text-based web browser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_%28web_browser%29) (probably links2 in your package manager).

Configure ntfy with your simplepush key:

~/.config/ntfy/ntfy.yml

backends:

• simplepush simplepush: key: 12345

Afterwards, you can just dump the website to a text file with Links and send a push notification to your phone when something changes:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

By starting without old.txt, we get a notification when we start the script

rm -f old.txt

Let's be polite here and not hammer the site.

POLL_FREQ_MIN=15

URL="https://example.com/"

while true; do touch old.txt links -dump "$URL" > new.txt

if ! diff -u old.txt new.txt > diff.txt; then
	# It's hard to condense the changes (diff.txt) into something readable,
	# so we just send the URL to easily click on on the phone.
    ntfy send "Check $URL"
fi

mv new.txt old.txt

sleep $(($POLL_FREQ_MIN * 60))

done

This only works for simple websites and there is a lot left to be desired. But it is doable in the 10 minutes of productivity a newborn baby gives you and it works to get appointments at government offices in Spain. 😉

PS. This blog post was written in another 10-minute productivity window.