Hey,

I'm looking for a program to monitor webpages for changes, like Website-Watcher. I've been doing some heavy googling but haven't really found anything yet, except WebSec but I don't something that mails me changes. KWebWatch that's mentioned on the WebSec page didn't work at all for me either so...

So if anyone knows of any website monitoring software for Linux, preferably with a GUI, I'd be really grateful.

Okay, you've said what you don't want, but not exactly what you do want. So....?

Do you want something that runs continuously, on demand, other? How should it advise you of changes?

Off the top of my head, I'm thinking it should be possible to cobble up a reasonable system using a combination of wget and diff, perhaps wrapped up in a shell script or perl script, and launched periodically by cron. Not sure if there would be a way of getting the server to return a response '304' (which would minimize traffic, as it is intended to do) using this scenario. On the other hand, you do need to avoid the complication of reading a stale version from a cache somewhere.

You should be aware that frequent hits on a web page on someome else's server may be construed as hostile, and may elicit hostility in response. I guess it all depends on how frequently you are testing and how much traffic you are generating.


--- rod.