

Show HN: Sieve - filter webpages and watch changes - ajitk
http://getsieve.com

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elehack
Cool concept, but name collision: Sieve has been the name of a server-side
mail filtering language for quite some time.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_%28mail_filtering_langua...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_%28mail_filtering_language%29)

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ajitk
Glad that you liked the concept. Wasn't aware of the unfortunate name
collision. I am open to suggestions. Thanks!

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alariccole
Siv. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5739784>

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ajitk
Liked this suggestion. Unfortunately the domain names getsiv.com and
sivapp.com are taken.

Edit: siv.io could be nice.

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jstanley
This is very awesome! The implementation is different to what I expected (or
to what I would have done).

They seem to run a browser on the server and let the user interact with it to
choose DOM elements to monitor for changes. I would have just taken a
screenshot (perhaps with <http://urlbox.io/> or perhaps with CutyCapt) and
allowed the user to draw boxes over the screenshot. Then repeatedly screenshot
the site and whenever the contents of that box changes, alert the user.

The Sieve method has the advantage that you are able to tell the user what the
new text is. The screenshot method is significantly simpler.

EDIT: So, in startup terms, the screenshot method could be the MVP :).
Provided, of course, that it is considered "viable" not to know the text. If I
were a user I would consider it viable - it is still a vast improvement over
having to check the site manually.

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onassar
I'm been working on <http://imnosy.com> for a while, and thought about that
approach, but ran into difficulties when slight variations to the screen were
made. Right now, we're using a diff engine. Sieve looks pretty rad though.
Will check that out. Fun space :)

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jstanley
This is what the selection boxes are useful for - you can make it ignore
changes to irrelevant areas of the page (though obviously that doesn't apply
so well to imnosy).

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chch
I'd been mulling over the same concept for quite a while, as a sort of an
intelligent update to IE5 for Mac's Subscription manager[1]. It was a very
useful tool in my toolbox, and I mourned losing it as that browser decayed.

The main issue with the Subscriptions was that they were global, and would not
inform you what changed, just that there were changes. With the increased
dynamicness of the web since good ol' Y2K (especially with ads), this model is
much less feasible, whereas a DOM-based model is more robust, and allows
further automatic data processing.

I never got past small prototypes, so I look forward to Sieve's release since
it is basically someone doing my work for me! :)

[1] <http://www.macoptions.com/tips/images/iesub2.gif>

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ajitk
Ah IE5! It has been a very long wait. :) We are hard at work to launch Sieve.
Optimistically we should be ready in a couple of months.

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ajitk
Hello HN! I am excited to show Sieve. Its in alpha state and under active
development.

Would appreciate your feedback. Checkout Visual Selector used to let user
filter content from a webpage.

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opminion
If what you are doing is essentially a diff for news, then you might be onto
something very interesting.

The way news are consumed is currently tiered by the temporal interval which
they cover: breaking news, daily news, weekly, monthly, annual summaries. A
diff for news can help process the different tiers from a single reader,
without the "breaking news" tier taking over.

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ajitk
At its core, the essential work is to detect changes important to the user.
Adding summarization techniques to further weed out the noise would be a very
important improvement.

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smickie
Can I ask what sort of libraries you're using for the canvas-in-page-browser-
selector? Is it server or client side?

The technology here is spectacular. Great job!

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ajitk
Thanks for your kind words. The stack is a mix of both. Browser runs on the
server and sends updates to the client via websocket. Then it is painted on
the client. On the client-side a part of noVNC js library is used to capture
input and is sent to the browser running on the server.

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hornbaker
Pretty slick. Could be the seed of a lightweight Browserling competitor, if
you could scale it economically.

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ajitk
Thats an excellent suggestion. We do have plans to modularize the browser
component to offer browser as a web service.

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alariccole
Might I suggest, re the name collision, to simplify the name to Siv? Sieve is
prone to misspellings, and "Siv" has more of a brand feel to it.

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Jhsto
One of my friend's summerjob is to keep eye on heat rates of some electrical
engines (web page, as it seems) and he will surely love this.

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borplk
Is the selection of the relevant part of the page not possible on the client
side? Through some iframe magic or something?

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ajitk
It is not possible select content using iframes due to client-side security
restrictions imposed by the browser.

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aatifh
Btw, the landing page is a Stripe.com rip off.

