WebChangeMonitor

I wrote a small shell script, that’ll check any resource on the web and writes an email if something changed. It is really simple but has one fancy feature: you can manage the things you’d like to check with BibSonomy.

You can download the tool as tar.gz or zip file.

Installation

Download the tool and unpack it into bin/webChangeMonitor in your home directory. If you don’t want to install it there you’ll have to change the working directory in the file webChangeMonitorWrapper.sh and genSitesConf.sh: the variable WD should hold the directory where you installed the tool.

Then you have to change the email addresses in the file webChangeMonitor.conf. Finally you should enter some sites you’d like to check in the sites.conf file; enter them in the form some_name_without_spaces some_web_resource.

Now the tool is ready and can be installed as a cron job with crontab -e:

11 1 * * * $HOME/bin/webChangeMonitor/webChangeMonitorWrapper.sh

This will run the tool once at night. If you don’t know what a crontab is, you might want to read this.

Managing your resources with BibSonomy

If you’d like to manage your resources with BibSonomy, all you have to do is to tag them with a special tag. The default is watch but it can be any tag or any combination of tags.

All you have to do is to adjust these variables in the genSitesConf.sh:

USER
Your user name.
PASS
Your API key.
TAGS
Your special tag. If you’d like to enter more than one tag, separate them with a + sign.

Finally you can install the tool as a cronjob and run it before webChangeMonitorWrapper.sh is executed. Note: If you make manual changes in the sites.conf file, these changes will not be lost.

Why?

I wanted a small tool, that would leverage my bookmarks stored in BibSonomy and if some special web resource changes, it should send me an email. All I have to do is to tag these special websites, RSS feeds, you name it, with some tag and that’s it.

So why: it’s an easy and convenient way to monitor resources on the web.