Web Secretary 1.9.0 review

Web Secretary is a web page monitoring software

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 31K Developer: Baruch Even

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Web Secretary is a web page monitoring software. However, it goes beyond the normal functionalities offered by such software. It will detect changes based on content analysis, making sure that it's not just HTML that changed, but actual content.

You can tell it what to ignore in the page (hit counters and such), and it can mail you the document with the changes highlighted or load the highlighted page in a browser.

Web Secretary is actually a suite of two Perl scripts called websec and webdiff. websec retrieves web pages and email them to you based on a URL list that you provide. webdiff compares two web pages (current and archive) and creates a new page based on the current page but with all the differences highlighted using a predefined color.

For example you can look at the Web Secretary page as it was monitored:

Old Page - The original page before the change.
Modified Page - The page after the change.
Highlighted Page - The page as WebSec sends, highlighted.

Personally, I put Web Secretary on crontab to monitor a large number of web pages. When the highlighted pages are delivered to me, I use procmail to sort them out and file them into another folder. Sometimes, when I am busy, I will not have time to accessing the web for a few days. However, with Web Secretary, I can always access the "archive" that it has created for me at my own leisure.

Requirements:
Perl 5
LWP module

Installation:

Simply unpack the archive and modify the configuration file to your hearts content. There is no GUI to configure this program, it's all in the text files.