3 Ways to Monitor a Webpage for Changes
Summary
Seamus explains how to monitor a webpage for changes when a road closure prevents reaching Halligan Bay Campground at Lake Eyre.
He wanted to see about 20,000 pelicans but discovered the road into Halligan Bay is closed due to flooding, and asks for a way to be alerted when it reopens.
He demonstrates three options:
And offers three FREE Claude CoWork invites for one week each
Transcript
About a month ago, I was down here in Rapid Bay below Adelaide and I wanted to come up and see Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre National Park. In particular, I wanted to go to this Halligan Bay campground, which is a 60km road from a bit south of William Creek into there. The main reason (I’ve been to see Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre twice before) was to see the pelicans. Apparently there are about 20,000 pelicans, so I just really wanted to see them.
Anyway, I checked all the roads and everything was fine up to William Creek Hotel. But what I didn’t do was check that the road which comes from about here into Halligan Bay was open. It’s a tiny little road, so it’s not on there. So when I got there, I found out from the website for the road that it’s closed. You can’t get in there until further notice because of flooding. That’s very annoying. I really want to see the pelicans.
So my only alternative is to wait until this opens, which I’ve got no idea when that would be. This is an example of when you really want to monitor a web page and have it tell you when things change. There’s sort of four ways of doing that, and this is quite handy for a whole lot of reasons. All sorts of things that you might want to know when things change. So there are four ways of doing it.
One is just to navigate to this page every day or every week, whenever, and manually look at it. But in this instance, I’m probably going to be close enough in the area for the next six weeks and I want to see the moment it’s open so that I can make plans on whether I can come back up and see it or not. My plan in the next few weeks is there’s a track that goes from Ceduna up here to the transcontinental railway and then over here. So it would end up being around here, and then I could come up and see it later again if that fitted in with my timeline. For me, checking every day is no good. I just forget, or something else will happen.
There are two bits of software specifically designed for doing this that you can use, and you can also use AI. AI is the easiest way. You have to have a paid version of something like Claude Cowork, but let’s do the two software ways first. The first one is browse.ai, and there will be a link in the description. You do need to create an account, which I’ve done, and then you click “monitor pages.”
I’m just going to highlight the page that I want to monitor, go back to here, and paste that in there. If a page or website needs logging in, you tick that. Then it’ll ask for your passwords. So I’m going to start this training robot, Robot Studio. It’s fairly self-explanatory once you get in there, and the next software I’m going to show you is pretty similar to this.
We’re going to navigate to the page. You don’t need to know any code or anything like that for any of these. Do we want to capture text or a screenshot? I’m going to capture text. It’s not in a list, because this is the text I want to capture. It’s just text. So I click “just text” and then I hover over the bit that I want. Now, I can hover over that whole bit, or in reality, this is the bit that I want to monitor. So I click in there, it shows me the visible text, and that’s okay. So I’m going to choose that.
This is just an internal note for you. It now tells me that that’s the name I’m using and that’s the text it’s going to look for for any changes. Save the captured text and then finish. Now it will show me what it’s looking for and it gives you a name. I’m just going to do “Halligan Road Status” and save. We can choose any frequency we want. I probably only want it once a week, I think. Actually, I’ll do it every three days, starting tomorrow. I just want it at 9am, notify me by email, which is what I want, and save that.
So it’s going to look for this text. It’s going to show me the final screen here: does the task above match what you want? And I say yes, looks good. So that’s in there. Now, if I go back to my homepage, you’ll see this one here is ready for me to go.
The next one is called Page Crawl. Totally similar. You do need to log in, which I’ve done. Click “track new page,” paste the URL in, and it’s just slightly different. For instance, you can track prices to see if something is going to go up or down in price. You can say “let me know when it’s XYZ price.” So we want to go to a specific area. It’s just cleaning up the page here. And we want to click on the area. That’s what we want. You’ve got to wait till it highlights the area that you want, and you can check the tracked content here. That’s what we want. Track frequency: I’m just going to say this one every four days. You can do whatever you like. Notify me via email, and then start tracking. You’ll see that that’s listed there to track any changes when they come in.
Now, the final way, which I’m showing you for two reasons, is by using Claude Cowork. This is actually the easiest way to do it. I’ve got a paid version of Claude Cowork and you do need a paid version. I’ve got three gift invitations to Claude Cowork that I can give away. So the first three people who click on the link in the description will get a week free of the paid version, as well as instructions to set it up.
I’ve played with this already. I’m going to make another task, so “new task.” The easiest way to do this is to actually ask Claude what you want to do. So I’m going to say “I want to monitor any changes in a specific area of this website.” I’m using WisprFlow there to talk to my computer to type. It’s a lot quicker. Then I’m just going to put the page in and ask it the best way to do it. I don’t need to know if there’s a way to do it in any other software. I want to know the best way to use it in Cowork. So I’ll just ask it: what’s the best way to get this done using Cowork?
You just use natural language. It’s the best way to get a good prompt and discussion. That’s one of the good things about these AI tools. You can ask it what’s the best way to do something. So I’m just going to hit the go button there. It will think for a little bit. Cowork is different to Claude chat in that Cowork does tasks for you. It does all sorts of tasks, but this is just a very simple task that it can do for us. In a minute, it should come up and say “let’s schedule a task.”
Yeah, it’s got even more detail than I’d thought here. So it’s given us some options, and number one is what we want. So it’s now going to fine-tune its answer because it’s got that information. This is language, not anything else like in the other two software areas. I was going to say “let’s set up a scheduled task,” but it’s going to do that for us. So it’s going to check every day. Now, I could go in and change that, but let’s just leave it at that for the moment. So I’ve got to click “schedule” to give it permission to do that. Click schedule.
Now it tells me what it’s done. I can click “run now” from my scheduled tasks. But what I’m just going to do, because I don’t want it every day, is ask it again. “Please change the number of times the task needs to be scheduled to once every week.” Again, I’m just pressing down two keys and talking into the computer with Whisper Flow, which I’ll put a link in the description as well. It’s so much quicker. So theoretically, it will update that scheduled task.
That’s not quite what I wanted, I don’t think. But I’m just going to click “update” here and see. Oh, here we go. Done. Changed to every Monday at 8am. Now I can check that up here, and you can actually see the previous one I did earlier. We can get it to run only when your computer is awake. I’m always awake by 8 or 9 in the morning, so I’m not going to worry about keep-awake, because that would stop the computer going to sleep, which I don’t want. That now will work for you until you tell it to stop.
I’ve got three guest passes. You get a free week of Cowork and you get instructions on how to set it up. I can also show you how to set it up, but it’s just an easy way to see the power of some of these tools. With the other two, they’re quite easy to set up, but I find just talking to the computer in natural language is a hell of a lot easier.
So, that’s all of them. If you’re interested in getting a free week of Claude Cowork, put your name in. I’ll have a link in the description, and if you’re within the first three, you’ll get your free gift. Thank you.
