Discussion

Site Spy

makepostai: This is interesting, gonna try it on our next project! thumb up

pwr1: Interesting... added to bookmarks. Could come in handy in the future

xnx: I like https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io for this. Open source and free to run locally or use their Saas service.

vkuprin: Yep, changedetection.io is a good project. With Site Spy, I wanted to make the browser-first workflow much easier: install the extension, connect it to the dashboard, click the exact part of the page you care about, and then follow changes as diffs, history, or RSS with very little setup. I can definitely see why the open-source / self-hosted route is appealing too.

enoint: Quick feedback:1. RSS is just fine for updates. Given the importance of your visa use-case, were you thinking of push notifications?2. Your competition does element-level tracking. Maybe they choose XPath?

vkuprin: Yep, Site Spy already has push notifications, plus email and Telegram alerts. I see RSS as the open interface for people who want to plug updates into their own reader or workflow. For urgent things like visa slots or stock availability, direct alerts are definitely the main path.And yeah, element-level tracking isn't a brand new idea by itself. The thing I wanted to improve was making it easy to pick the exact part of a page you care about and then inspect the change via diffs, history, or RSS instead of just getting a generic "page changed" notification

bananaflag: Very good!This is something that existed in the past and I used successfully, but services like this tend to disappear

raphman: There's also https://github.com/thp/urlwatch/ - (not aware of any SaaS offer - self-hosted it is).

vkuprin: Yep, urlwatch is a good one too. This category clearly has a strong self-hosted tradition. With Site Spy, what I’m trying to make much easier is the browser-first flow: pick the exact part of a page visually, then follow changes through diffs, history, RSS, and alerts with very little setup

hinkley: Back in 2000 I worked for a company that was trying to turn something like this into the foundation for a search engine.Essentially instead of having a bunch of search engines and AI spamming your site, the idea was that they would get a feed. You would essentially scan your own website.As crawlers grew from an occasional visitor to an actual problem (an inordinate percent of all consumer traffic at the SaaS I worked for was bots rather than organic traffic, and would have been more without throttling) I keep wondering why we haven’t done this.Google has already solved the problem of people lying about their content, because RSS feeds or user agent sniffing you can still provide false witness to your site’s content and purpose. But you’d only have to be scanned when there was something to see. And really you could play games with time delays on the feed to smear out bot traffic over the day if you wanted.