VisualPing - Get notified on visual changes to a website or website area | Hacker News Reader

VisualPing - Get notified on visual changes to a website or website area

visualping.io

59 pointsdermerkel23 comments

Hmmm, they ask for your email address, but there is no privacy policy on the site. What are they going to do with your email address? Use it, spam it, sell it to others?

Also, no loop-back check on email. What's to stop you signing up a dozen other people to this free service? It would be polite to bounce a "confirmation" email back first before sending.

+1 on the earlier comment about samples, and indication of notification format.

This looks interesting! I would like to see an example of the notifications, and what Tiny/Medium/Major change levels mean, though.

I am also specifically interested in what techniques they they are using to determine the levels of change - Is it based on content changes or changes in (x)html tree structure?

since it says visual ping, perhaps render html => image and take diffs periodically , setting threshold to size of difference?

Since, you can specify a specific slice of the page to monitor, it's likely diffing screenshots.

Interesting, but you should definitely add some visual examples.

Brett Slatkin gave a nice talk at this years Velocity on Perceptual Diffs and potential benefits of integration with a continuous deploy process.

http://velocityconf.com/velocity2013/public/schedule/detail/...

It doesn't look like the video is online anywhere, but the slides are available.

Where is the site being pinged from? The website indicates it is based on Switzerland, but does that mean you are doing it from there using whatever back-end service you are running or is it going to be run locally from my own browser?

This is great. It's similar to this project built during the LAUNCH Hackathon a few months ago: http://www.gowatchtower.com

Thanks for the shoutout javiercr! We've been so busy we haven't pushed this forward but given how much interest there is in these types of tools, we may just need to put some time on the calendar and polish up the product. Would love to hear more about what use cases people have besides product tracking, competitive monitoring, etc.

This could've been useful yesterday so people could get pinged when the Apple Store came back online for pre-orders ;)

An example on the landing page would've been really helpful.

I wonder if there is something like this I could use for automated testing of style changes to an app/site. Currently I have to regression test the style manually.

There are a couple of open source projects for visual regression testing -

Wraith, used by BBC: https://github.com/BBC-News/wraith

Huxley, by Facebook: https://github.com/facebook/huxley

A partner of mine has used http://mogotest.com/ on a production site to add some regression testing for visual changes. You'd have to look into it more specifically, but I believe it worked fairly well.

Seems like a good idea but as mentioned no privacy policy does raise a few concerns. Also, when I tried the www.google.com example it redirected to www.google.ch

I'd be interested to hear about the technical details of this. Someone below suggested filesize comparison. Would that really work?

They seem to have trouble pinging themselves.

Typing in their own site and hitting go takes multiple minutes to return a screenshot.

I use the Page Monitor chrome extension because I like to customize what changes, like prices on computer parts.

This could be useful for finding out when a service is updated or you can preorder something.

Feature idea: Offer to take the screenshot from different OS/Browser!

What is used to take screenshots?

maybe wkhtmltopdf and then filesize-comparision?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com