Cronrss

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Contents 1 The idea 2 Usage 3 Examples 4 Benefits 5 Implementation 5.1 Features

The idea

Cronrss verifies if the web page pointed by a given URL has changed over time. If it has, cronrss will send a notice email to you. The URL list is kept in the ~/.cronrss/url text file (one URL per line).

It is very useful to use URLs which point to rss feeds.

There's already an implementation: Cronrss

Usage

1) Put all the URLs you want to check in the ~/.cronrss/url text file (one URL per line).

2) Run cronrss

cronrss [-d [seconds]]

If the `-d' option is specified, it will check periodically the URLs. You can specify its frequency in seconds (default is 1800s = 30min)

cronrss update

Each time you modify the url_list, you have to run `cronrss update`

The general description of the idea goes here.

Examples

echo http://www.hackaday.org >> ~/.cronrss/url
cronrss update
cronrss -d

# From this point on, whenever hackday.org changes you will get an email
# which shows you the text differences

Since hackaday has a rss feed it is better to use this URL instead:
http://www.hackaday.com/rss.xml

Benefits

• You can check the changes of any web page. For example http://slackware.com/ hasn't an rss feed, but with cronrss is quite easy to check for updates

• You don't need to use thunderbird or others bad-big-fat programs to check a rss feed

Implementation

Features

• It is a simple shell script which uses `links': http://freaknet.org/alpt/src/utils/cronrss