Website Change Detection Monitoring

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I woke up this morning to receive something I have been expecting for some time.

The "death knell" of changedetection.com

I've made a video walkthrough of the site in case someone wants to duplicate it's functionality.   Please plan on making it ad-supported - in most cases private users like me will not stand for a paid for product - certainly not one that costs as much as I pay for groceries for the family on any particular day!


There were a couple of pages (from the top navigation), that I missed on the demo.

The Webmasters link

This must have been useful for self-generating marketing for changedetection.com over the years.

Webmaster's were able to get some generated HTML code to paste into their site.



The Directory Link

This page gives some indication of the scope and capacity of ChangeDetection.com

Today it is monitoring over 2 million pages.  I was monitoring 50 pages (but am probably quite a heavy user).   If we guesstimate average 5 pages per user:  Maybe there are 400,000 users on the system.



There is then an Alphabetic and Chronological list of pages in the Public directory (the majority of pages are however non-public).



The chronological list is quite sweet as you can see early pages being added back in the year 2000



The first proper entry that still exists appears on 23 Feb 2008 and is a link to http://cprr.org/Museum/notify.html (Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum)  That site still exists (although it is showing it's vintage in it's design).

























The Compare Page

This page looks to pull out some of the functionality of the site allowing visitors to manually check the difference between 2 public pages.


There are options for:


  • Full page - HTML changes are shown hilighted on the new version of the HTML document.
  • Text Extracts - A block of text is returned with spans indicating existing, new, and deleted text. Text is ellipsed and limited in size.
  • All Text - A block of text is returned with spans indicating existing, new and deleted text. All text is included.


And Finally the email notification

Alerts are sent via email.  This is an example of the very useful notification I used to get when the local weather site now includes the word for "snow" (I mentioned this in the video above - very handy to have a notification like this!), and a link to the page itself - where I was able to see what day the snow is due.


So long ChangeDetection and thanks for all the fish!

I've archived my list so when I find a decent replacement I can copy them over.  Anyone want to chip in join me?

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