So, I have this site that I want to monitor. I want to be able to have something send a bunch of emails if certain things happen to the HTML. I'd like it to check every, say, hour or so to see if the HTML has changed. If it hasn't changed, it shouldn't send an email, but logging that it checked would be good.
Any suggestions?
Do you own the site?
Many of the hosts provide this feature
Is somebody trying to guard against Wikipedia edits?
Web Scraper, possibly?
easy.
use wget to grab the webpage as it is now, undisturbed. get a md5 or sha1 of that webpage, write it down
write a bash script that uses wget to fetch the file, then md5/sha1 it, compare that value with your "known good" value, and email you if they don't match.
put this script in your crontab to run every N seconds/minutes/hours
done
What I need is really to monitor one tag. I've thought about cron-ing a shell script to wget the page, and then grepping for the tag, but I don't have the grep-fu to check, for example, for the tag being commented out. The page is dynamic, so hashing probably isn't a good strategy.
Then what you want is Beautiful Soup, and some python-fu.
So, what language is this you speak?
Nothing useful, sorry.
For "regular" monitoring I'd use something like nagios. Not sure if there is a plugin that will do what you want, though.
BoxheadTim wrote: For "regular" monitoring I'd use something like nagios. Not sure if there is a plugin that will do what you want, though.
I've been assuming that he is not the admin of the page that he is monitoring.
I assumed that too, but IIRC you can point nagios at pretty much any page, admin or not.
Should be easy to do with a shellscript or python script...you just need wget and grep (or equivalents) and some logic to put them together. If you PM me with details I could hack something up for you. Is this going to run from a Windows or *nix machine?
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