Show HN: Changedetection.io detect changes in websites and JSON feeds

There seem to be a lot of these services ("scrape X in order to generate an RSS/webhook/etc. change feed for X"), but I feel that I can't rely on any of them.

For anything that I would need this particular service for, my highest-concern requirement is that I'm able able to "set and forget" the service for literal years at a time. But almost always, services like this just drop dead eventually; or they tweak their scraping algorithms in ways that make previously-working configs break; etc.

Is there a change-detection service like this, being provided with stable SLAs by one of the cloud IaaS providers?

I suppose I could always find a self-hosted software product for this, and deploy it myself. But though the software would be stable, that's not very "set and forget" either; I'd be on the hook for applying updates, etc.

I want something that is to the "HTTP response change detection" abstraction, as S3-alike object-lifecycle event notifications are to the "object-storage change detection" abstraction. Some simple plumbing primitive that does exactly one thing, exactly one (obvious) way, that can be used to build the higher-level abstractions I want, with nine nines of uptime behind it, and the expectation it'll stick around for at least the next decade.

I used this to replace Visualping.io. The only features it lacks compared to VisualPing is a GUI for selecting page elements to monitor and fully rendered diff results. It either monitors the whole page or you can add a CSS selector manually.

Nice and easy to self-host with Docker, thanks. Might save me more than a few bookmarks that I check every couple weeks manually.

Small feature wish: optionally fetch and display favicons next to the URLs or <title>s in the website list.

I'm using urlwatch for this:

https://thp.io/2008/urlwatch/

Looks nice! Good luck.

Were in a similar space, coming out with a SaaS in a few weeks.

Nice little project. I played around with it for a bit, but couldn't figure out how to extract snippets (e.g. a list of headlines, like from the hackernews home page). It seems to be good at grabbing a dumb dump of text within a given CSS selector, but no regex pattern matching within a line (the regex fields appear to toss out all lines that match the pattern).

How did you create the screenshot difference? https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.i...

This would fit well as a browser extension - generate your own feeds with or without RSS. Coupled with a simple topic classifier with user defined topics it would bring some order to the chaos.

I tried this project recently, but it didn’t seem to handle pages that load content dynamically via XHR. At least the couple pages I tried at the time.

Nice! Does it have an API for adding URLs to monitor? Would be nice to have a browser extension to do that easily.