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Monitor web page for changes (incl. login to the site)

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jeromg:
Hi DCers,

I'm looking for the best way to monitor a web page for changes (this is a website that requires me to login first).

Ideally, this app/script would:
  - send me an alert (email is fine).
  - crawl the page every x hours/minutes and send an alert every time the page is different from the previous state

Any suggestion?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers from Paris,

Jerome

mouser:
Website Watcher has always been my favorite.  It is a desktop app designed primarily for interactive use though.  For simply emailing you when a website changes yuo might have good luck with one of the online services.  But Website Watcher is worth a try as it is one of those really great tools.  There are some discussions of this kind of software on the forum:
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=search2;search=website+watcher

IainB:
The Firefox add-on UpdateScanner is pretty useful for monitoring difficult-to-check websites. For quite a long time now I have used it to check a few special sites.
For example, I usually monitor websites via an RSS feed into the Bazqux RSS reader (a replacement for Google Reader), and that included Yahoo! Groups, but when Yahoo disabled access via RSS, I found UpdateScanner to be a very handy alternative.
You can set the frequency of scanning, and it can be set to pop up with a little window and a chime when a monitored site changes. When you go take a look-see at the changed site, any changed text on the page can be highlighted if you want.

Refer: Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

jeromg:
Thanks mouser (and good positive thoughts to you after the loss of Saffron) and IainB for the suggestions.

I'm using Chrome as my main browser, I'll look if there is an alternative to the UpdateScanner FF plugin, the thing is that the websites I want to monitor contain fairly sensitive information and I'm not sure I'll trust an online service to store my passwords. Which makes Website Watcher (which I tried years ago) a good contender despite the price.
I'll go on with my search...

Cheers,

Jerome

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