redlite

redlite is a simple update scanner that scans any website on command and keeps an HTML diff of the changes, which can be displayed in any browser.

Dependencies

• HTML Diff by Aaron Swartz (included in the repository)
• wget

Workflow

1. The URIs to scan need to be specified in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/redlite/urls. The config file's syntax is straight forward: one URI per line.

   After the URI, any additional wget parameters may be specified, e.g. --username, as well as any pipes, e.g. to sed. Here are a few examples:

   # simple URI
   http://www.google.de
   # stripping a footer with sed
   http://www.somesite.com/index.html.de | sed '/id="footer"/,$d'
   # username and password for HTTP auth
   http://www.foo.bar.om/strange/ --user dilbert --password arrrgh

   As you can see, comments are lines starting with a hash tag and are ignored.

2. Now, redlite -s will scan all of those URIs and generate the diffs if changes occurred. Note that on the first scan, no diff is generated. If you want output, use redlite -s -v.

3. A call to redlite -q will list all the stored diff files on stdout.

   Alternatively, you can call redlite -o to directly open all the diffs in your browser. Note that $BROWSER has to be set for this to work.

   (awesome for example does not currently propagate that variable)

4. A call to redlite -c will discard all current diffs and mark all sites as having no changes.