About a year back I had written a script that would scrape a page every 15 minutes, and notify me when the content changed. It was basically a Band Tour page, and I wanted to be the first to know when the tickets got announced so that I could grab 'em before they got sold out.

P.S. : It was an amazing concert. :)

Assuming this is reliable it would be great for job searches. (if you're targeting smaller organizations with static-enough job pages) Seems a bit expensive though--especially when I might rather sign up for, say, daily checks on up to 240 websites instead of hourly checks on 10 websites.

I actually do this. It's far more effective to apply for new postings than whatever happens to be live at the moment, as companies will happily advertise a position even as they're waiting for a candidate to accept an offer they've made, keeping new applicants around 'just in case'.

But I just use cron, shell, and github.

I'm building a product in kinda new market. I'll use something like this to keep up with other landing pages.

I've set it up to monitor an "out-of-stock" string on a product I'd like to buy, but is going to be hard to get in the run up to Christmas, so I guess that's one.

If I was very keen, I guess I might pay a little to check more often than daily (although I haven't done that in this case).

I've used a script I wrote that does this basically to try and snag react conf tickets https://github.com/jnmandal/sitewatcher

One interesting case is tracking news sites. The details added or removed from new stories over time can sometimes support a claim of bias or agenda-driven reporting. Of course sometimes they are just corrections.

It could help with competitor analysis - point it to the websites of competition in your industry to stay on top of where they are going.

Monitoring companies you want to work for for new job postings is what I use similar tools for.

I wouldn't wait for a "formal opening" before applying. In fact, if you do, you're competing with even more people.

How has that worked for you?

So when do you apply?

Immediately. There's no harm, and it's more likely that a company is always interested in good applicants. You can always follow up again when the position does show up on their open position listing.

Also, if you apply during the "offseason", it's more likely that technical hire has more time to respond to you in more detail. I've developed a couple relationships that way that paved the way for an eventual hire in one case and a technical relationship in another.

So you just submit your resume to places you'd like to work, even if they're not hiring? Do you even look at job postings? That's interesting...

> What is the use case for this?

I've written something similar for a company who wanted to monitor their rival's website for news about expansion.

> Why would I pay for it?

I'm not sure either. A quick script in a cron job could also do this.

> A quick script in a cron job could also do this

I love comments like this. You couldn't hope for a better example of "shit's easy syndrome".

Yeah, a quick script in a cron job. Oh, but now we need 2 pages monitored. Now we need 100. Now provide an interface for marketing to add and remove pages. Make sure it emails these N people (different for each page of course!). Oh, this has to be up 24/7 so we'll need a server and monitoring and a test environment and deploy strategy. Your script is giving false positives because of changing asset timestamps. Oh, your script needs to provide a visual indication of what changed and when. Etc etc etc et cetera.

That's why you pay for things like this. Because it's actually a shitload of work.

I recently used a similar site (visualping.com) to score a pair of airpods, which are in tight supply, by watching my local apple store for availability. Worked beautifully. Write my own script, are you kidding?

> Yeah, a quick script in a cron job. Oh, but now we need 2 pages monitored. Now we need 100. Now provide an interface for marketing to add and remove pages. Make sure it emails these N people (different for each page of course!). Oh, this has to be up 24/7 so we'll need a server and monitoring and a test environment and deploy strategy. Your script is giving false positives because of changing asset timestamps. Oh, your script needs to provide a visual indication of what changed and when. Etc etc etc et cetera.

> I recently used a similar site (visualping.com) to score a pair of airpods, which are in tight supply, by watching my local apple store for availability. Worked beautifully. Write my own script, are you kidding?

You are totally conflating use cases. For most people, monitoring 2/3 things, a cron script works fine. In fact, I have one that's running right now and it Just Works (TM). By the time I need to provide visual diffs and have bulk email logic, I'm probably going to use an external tool (or whip it up as a side project if I think it's worth my time).

You can't equivocate the n=1 case and the n=10000 case.

> You can't equivocate the n=1 case and the n=10000 case.

Fair enough, but the comment I was replying to was equivocating those cases too. I was simply pointing out that maybe, just maybe, a service like this might have some value above and beyond a 5 minute script and a cron job. And indulging in a small rant against the "i could do that in a script/i could write that in a weekend" etc mindset.

I mean, I've written scripts like this, complete with Chef server deployment and filtering criteria. It's not surprising to see HN mention how feasible it is; we're not really the target market.

"I'm not sure either. A quick script in a cron job could also do this."

Except probably 99% percent of the planet couldn't tell you what a cron job is.

I think 99% is low balling it. Also, not all of the remainder could actually set one up either.

So, I am part of the 1%! Gosh, I didn't even know...

I get that, but we are on hackernews right now. Presumably a larger portion of the users here know what cron is.