
Show HN: Monitorbook – Easily track anything on the web - evenflow
http://monitorbook.com
======
normloman
Copywriter here. Good writing is concrete. Instead of telling me that I can
monitor things, give me examples (You can monitor prices online, etc.)

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aresant
Here's a business case for how this could be useful and why I'm going to try
it.

I operate a string of ~60 local businesses that have physical storefronts.

On average each store has 5 local competitors.

Our customers are VERY price sensitive - they will almost always call the
"lowest price" guy in the area first.

As a result we currently have a duct-tape system to monitor competitor pricing
and tweak ours as fast as possible.

MonitorBook would be a potentially much simpler mechanism to orchestrate this.

If the MB team is reading this drop me a line and we'd be a potentially great
case study / early adopter.

Things that would have to work to make this usable long-term:

a) API so we could pull this data into our pricing algo.

b) Clear error-checking confidence - if a site we're monitoring changes their
code / display and we miss it, we'd have to go back to duct-tape which is
sloppy and labor intensive, but reliable.

~~~
gee_totes
What happens if your competitors realize you are using the service and devise
some way to trick MontorBook into reporting the wrong prices?

[Edit: related link, which was the inspiration for my question:
[http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-get-
gmailcom-b...](http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-get-gmailcom-
banned-not-that-i.html)]

~~~
atmosx
You change your strategy :-) It's like Cryptonomicon "The most advanced
technology, usually wins the war".

If they can do that, you'll have to figure out quickly and adapt... But to my
personal experience, there are way more _what if(s)_ flying around than what
actually happens.

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spyder
Result of a quick try:

Tracking YouTube views doesn't work (shows "null")

Tracking HN points doesn't work (shows "null")

Tracking Reddit comment count works.

~~~
johnaveri
Thanks for letting us know (I'm one of the members of the Monitorbook team).
HN was working till a few days until a few days ago. I will look into it. We
have done our best to support as many websites as possible but it is not a
surprise that our scrapper is not perfect yet. We will keep working on it :)

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wspeirs
Why do I have to create a new account for this site? I have Google, Facebook,
Twitter, etc; consider using one of those site and OAuth to provide a more
frictionless experience for first-time users, especially considering your site
requires me to come back X days later to really see it work. My $0.02...

~~~
rcavezza
If your target audience is HN users, consider this comment. However, I've
found in my analytics that most users don't care about the type of login.

You can't please everyone. If a website has only username and password,
there's a complaint. If a website only has OAuth, there's a complaint.

~~~
sdsk8
why not both?

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rycho
that puzzled me too o.o

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selectout
Wow, seems like everyone has built a version of this. I've been working on
something similar as well, and really went for nailing down the element
selection. Seems to be a basic duplicate of what you have done. Best of luck.

~~~
rythie
Really? I couldn't seem to find anything other than webnumbr (which doesn't
seem to work anymore).

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jxm262
Sorry, my work pc doesn't have sound so I can't hear the actual video. Does
this track sites other than Amazon, or is that just the demo? Also, is there
an estimate on the pricing for the premium service?

Overall, I think it looks pretty clean. But I would probably add just a bit
more information on the main page. I see it's mostly in the video, but it
would be nice to get pricing details, description of exactly what things you
can track, etc..

Good job though :)

~~~
aaron987
There is nothing to hear anyway. It is just background music.

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sideproject
Very cool.. but what's the implication on the legal side? Many of the sites
forbid "automated" scraping of their sites.(sure they can be all
circumvented). On that note, what about sites like kimonolabs
([http://www.kimonolabs.com](http://www.kimonolabs.com)), they also let you
create an API on top of an existing webiste. I imagine it's done by scraping.
Would love to hear some thoughts.

~~~
atmosx
Scraping Amazon might be illegal, or at least not specifically allowed,
otherwise there would have been an API. However reading 'robots.txt' I guess
that their policy is 'open to scrapping' by search engines. Because what
google spiders do to virtually everyone, can be considered web scrapping.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/robots.txt](http://www.amazon.com/robots.txt)

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walterbell
Has there been work after RSS to improve pub/sub protocols for websites to
notify customers of changes/deltas, without the need for wholesale scraping?

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jxm262
I'm not aware of anything, but if someone else has some input I'd love to hear
about it. FWIW, I believe Amazon does have an affiliate api that lets you
search through the catalog. Same with Ebay, Alibaba, and most of the major
companies. The only one I can think of that doesn't is Craigslist.

~~~
TOMDM
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure that it's intentional on Craigslist's
part. Due to the first come first serve nature of a lot of the free listings,
it means that 'honest'/non-tool assisted users would never get a look in.

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non-sense
Nice website. Do you have plans to release an extension or an app for this? I
have been using Distill Chrome extension[1] to monitor pages with dynamic
content with pages that require authentication.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/distill-web-
monito...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/distill-web-
monitor/inlikjemeeknofckkjolnjbpehgadgge?hl=en)

~~~
johnaveri
Yes, the plan is to release a browser extension pretty soon. With the
extension you will be able to track content in pages which require
authentication. We also have an iOS app in the works so that you can check
your trackings on the go, and receive push notifications.

PS: I am a member of the monitorbook team

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tectonic
See also Huginn
([https://github.com/cantino/huginn](https://github.com/cantino/huginn))

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barce
I had something like this on my back burner for years called Sitebeagle. It's
command-line only. Glad these guys took the initiative to build something way
more robust. It'll be great for tracking 1 day deals, seeing if somebody's
logged in somewhere, and getting alerts for when band tickets go on sale. The
possibilities are endless.

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omouse
Very cool, I like it. Only comment is that you should try and get the video
zooming in on where the mouse is or do some close-ups of the screen. It was
hard to see exactly what was going on and it felt closer to a techie
screencast than to a customer product demo.

Is it possible to track the price of an ipad mini on craigslist? ;p

~~~
johnaveri
We will try to put up another video with better quality within the next few
days. Thanks for the feedback!

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baruch
I use websec as a cron command to do that for pages I care for and implemented
at some point an app in python I called NoticeThat that fell into oblivion as
I had no idea how to market it.

It's nice to see someone catering to that use case who can actually execute on
it.

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zoidb
Neat - I have a similar side-project in the works and I bet one of the
challenges will be how to handle pages that are difficult to scrape.

You might also want to check out
[https://visualping.io/](https://visualping.io/)

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leemac
Very cool. I've created something similar in the past to monitor various pages
but I did not get past the basic mock-up stage.

There are many use cases for this type of tool. Congrats on shipping
something.

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level09
How does this handle HTML changes over time ? I believe this will store a URL
+ Selector , then periodically scrap the page over time. just curious what
happens if the page changes later.

~~~
atmosx
You probably some sort of notification and you have to go the web page and
match the item again.

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tonyhb
Awesome. Along with the other people posting here, I also created something
similar a while back ([https://keepupdated.co](https://keepupdated.co))

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mrkibo
Conversation going on on Product Hunt:
[http://www.producthunt.com/posts/monitorbook](http://www.producthunt.com/posts/monitorbook)

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api_or_ipa
So... what does it do? I don't wanna sign up to figure out, in more specific
language, what exactly it tracks. Users? News? API calls?

~~~
nsomaru
I found the 57s video on the front page to be quite instructive:

it's a bookmarklet that identifies some portion of the screen to scrape (a
numerical value in the example), and tracks it over time, allowing you to set
alerts at thresholds (presumably so you can buy at a favourable price)

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thisisandyok
Found a typo on the signup page for premium accounts: "Enter your email below
to get early access to out premium account!"

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ubilanz
[https://www.changedetection.com/](https://www.changedetection.com/)

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nreece
Nice. There's [http://feedity.com](http://feedity.com) too.

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thesorrow
Nice project. I'm working on something similar but command line based and open
source.

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peddamat
"Receive real time nofitications"

Gentle suggestion to spell check.

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hbking
copy of [https://visualping.io](https://visualping.io) :-) :-)

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china
Smells like Shopify!

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ceejayoz
What does this have to do with Shopify?

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china
[https://monitorbook.com/user/sign_in](https://monitorbook.com/user/sign_in)

[https://example.myshopify.com/admin/auth/login](https://example.myshopify.com/admin/auth/login)

Very similar styling

:)

~~~
ceejayoz
Ah, that makes a lot more sense now.

