

VisualPing - Get notified on visual changes to a website or website area - dermerkel
http://visualping.io

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squeakynick
Hmmm, they ask for your email address, but there is no privacy policy on the
site. What are they going to do with your email address? Use it, spam it, sell
it to others?

Also, no loop-back check on email. What's to stop you signing up a dozen other
people to this free service? It would be polite to bounce a "confirmation"
email back first before sending.

+1 on the earlier comment about samples, and indication of notification
format.

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mmelin
This looks interesting! I would like to see an example of the notifications,
and what Tiny/Medium/Major change levels mean, though.

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netvarun
I am also specifically interested in what techniques they they are using to
determine the levels of change - Is it based on content changes or changes in
(x)html tree structure?

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ashah
since it says visual ping, perhaps render html => image and take diffs
periodically , setting threshold to size of difference?

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matmann2001
Since, you can specify a specific slice of the page to monitor, it's likely
diffing screenshots.

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danmaz74
Interesting, but you should _definitely_ add some visual examples.

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scottm01
Brett Slatkin gave a nice talk at this years Velocity on Perceptual Diffs and
potential benefits of integration with a continuous deploy process.

[http://velocityconf.com/velocity2013/public/schedule/detail/...](http://velocityconf.com/velocity2013/public/schedule/detail/28452)

It doesn't look like the video is online anywhere, but the slides are
available.

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canistr
Where is the site being pinged from? The website indicates it is based on
Switzerland, but does that mean you are doing it from there using whatever
back-end service you are running or is it going to be run locally from my own
browser?

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javiercr
This is great. It's similar to this project built during the LAUNCH Hackathon
a few months ago: [http://www.gowatchtower.com](http://www.gowatchtower.com)

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calbear81
Thanks for the shoutout javiercr! We've been so busy we haven't pushed this
forward but given how much interest there is in these types of tools, we may
just need to put some time on the calendar and polish up the product. Would
love to hear more about what use cases people have besides product tracking,
competitive monitoring, etc.

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martin_
This could've been useful yesterday so people could get pinged when the Apple
Store came back online for pre-orders ;)

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huhtenberg
An example on the landing page would've been really helpful.

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redeemedfadi
I wonder if there is something like this I could use for automated testing of
style changes to an app/site. Currently I have to regression test the style
manually.

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typpo
There are a couple of open source projects for visual regression testing -

Wraith, used by BBC: [https://github.com/BBC-
News/wraith](https://github.com/BBC-News/wraith)

Huxley, by Facebook:
[https://github.com/facebook/huxley](https://github.com/facebook/huxley)

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jlebron2
Seems like a good idea but as mentioned no privacy policy does raise a few
concerns. Also, when I tried the www.google.com example it redirected to
www.google.ch

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state
I'd be interested to hear about the technical details of this. Someone below
suggested filesize comparison. Would that really work?

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BrianEatWorld
They seem to have trouble pinging themselves.

Typing in their own site and hitting go takes multiple minutes to return a
screenshot.

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JimmaDaRustla
I use the Page Monitor chrome extension because I like to customize what
changes, like prices on computer parts.

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ldonley
This could be useful for finding out when a service is updated or you can
preorder something.

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flavien_bessede
Feature idea: Offer to take the screenshot from different OS/Browser!

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NVI
What is used to take screenshots?

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killerpopiller
maybe wkhtmltopdf and then filesize-comparision?

