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Comment by richev | Hacker News Reader

https://visualping.io/ can do this, although it sends email alerts rather than SMS messages.

I used it to notify me of new Hololens events, listed on this page https://www.microsoftevents.com/profile/web/index.cfm?PKwebI...

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Other possible services include https://uptimerobot.com/ and https://www.pingdom.com/

Just set it to check for the presence of a word on the page, etc.

How do you deal with the legality of scraping?

I was hired to scrape some economic related pages and build an excel file and email it, I got that done but not sure if I should try to host this and turn it into a service or just set it up for the client and let them deal with it. It's just personal use on their part.

I would not equate scraping with periodic searching for a keyword.

The problematic part is when you scrape data off of websites, and the owners don't want you to do it; as in, they would not even be happy if you manually copied that stuff into an excel file for fun or profit.

I can see that, although automating to decrease views of a page(from checking by refresh)... I suppose the end result is sign up in this case.

So for me I'll set it up for them and them run it.

> How do you deal with the legality of scraping?

How did Google deal with it, when they started their search engine business?

My counter to this is, without Google's "algorithm" the search results would not be great/find what you want. And in this case websites want to volunteer/agree to index their site for visibility but then you still have to visit the site because conveniently The site summary ends before the content that you want. I don't know how I would find websites unless referred on some website.

I kinda felt the same way about how Netflix started out but I think they probably had a deal to pay a portion of revenue from dvd's that they rented out.

robots.txt

https://www.google.com/killer-robots.txt

Because this was very important to me and my life forward, I thought it was better to roll my own custom notifier. Moreover, the phone call thing was the most important part which will get attention any time of the day than an email.

So bounce your (unique) e-mail to an SMS-forwarder :)

I like the telegram API :)

Cool! Thanks for that Already using it to track whenever a couple stores here in Japan put the Nintendo Switch back in inventory or lottery sale

This is awesome, thank you.

No Hololens events in London, is that by design?

Wait a while...it took about six months for one to happen here in Sydney. Well worth the wait - half an hour of exclusive use of a Hololens. All the while being recorded for market research purposes, but that seemed like a fair trade.

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