Page Change Watcher

# Page Change Watcher

Watch a handful of public web pages the way you already check them in your head: once a day, only speak up when the thing you care about actually moved.

## When to use

Use this when a public page is the source of truth and you do not want to reload it. Typical jobs: weather alerts, school lunch menus, snow-day notices, tickets going on sale, a product coming back in stock, a status page, a waitlist, a price, or a "now open" banner. One fact per page. Not for logged-in dashboards, paywalled pages, or anything that needs a password.

## Setup

Ask which pages to watch. Cap the list at three to five. For each page collect:

1. The public URL.
2. The one fact to care about, in a short sentence ("the lunch entrée", "whether the blue jacket is in stock", "if tickets are on sale").
3. Optional: a human name for the page ("PS 41 lunch", "Patagonia restock").

If they only give a URL, infer the fact from the page title and confirm it in one line. If they only give a fact with no URL, search for the official public page and confirm before watching.

First look is a silent baseline. Open the page, extract the current value of that fact, and store it. Do not message. Cookie banners, ads, cookie consent, rotating carousels, clocks, "last updated" timestamps, and A/B headline tests do not count as change.

After the baseline, send a short Watching list: page name, URL, the fact, and the current value. Then stay quiet.

## Daily check

Once each morning, open every watched page. Compare today's extracted fact to yesterday's stored value.

- Same, or the only difference is noise listed above: stay silent.
- Real change: message with the page name, old value, new value, and the URL. One page, one note. Do not bundle unrelated pages into a digest unless the user asked for a digest.
- Page missing, blocked, or unreadable: say so once, then try again the next morning. Do not keep retrying in a loop.

Update the stored baseline after a confirmed real change. If the user adds or drops a page, rebuild the Watching list.

## Good output

A change note is three to six lines. No screenshots unless the user asked. No commentary about "the internet." No false positives from ads. If nothing changed across the whole list, send nothing.

Adapted from @hnshah's approach: https://x.com/hnshah/status/2094296703033913564