I would like to run a program locally which opens a website, looks for a particular word/phrase, and if it doesn't find it then the program sends me an email/sms/play a sound/etc.

i've used a program PA Server Monitor before but I was looking for something of the free variety.

Any ideas?

3/18/2009 4:29:15 PM

about 6 lines of perl should do the trick

3/18/2009 5:37:40 PM

about 6 lines of perl should do the trick

3/18/2009 5:54:20 PM

i figured that would be ya'lls answer...but i'm no perl guy

plz to provide said 6 lines or a link. thx

3/18/2009 6:24:34 PM

curl blah.com/index.html .
if grep -i "whatever you're lookin for" index.html; then echo yay;
else sendmail -necessary switches email@stuff.com -message "your shit aint there"
fi

insert above into proper cron tab

[Edited on March 18, 2009 at 6:40 PM. Reason : I prefer sendEmail on *nix if sendmail isnt installed]

3/18/2009 6:39:56 PM

Selenium IDE.

Simple to make a test case, look for anything that Javascript would have access to. You run the tests in Firefox as a plugin.

Or if you want to automate the whole deal, you can use a script like above, or use just about any major programming language to run the Selenium Remote Control against the test cases made in the IDE.

We use Se all the time at work for testing things like this. Pretty good little tool, especially since it's free.

3/18/2009 7:40:02 PM

oh wait theres a free version

http://www.poweradmin.com/servermonitor/free.aspx

3/21/2009 8:58:48 AM

while that app is complete overkill for what you need, I'm glad you posted it. I'm definitely going to use it for something at work.

3/21/2009 11:19:50 AM

a) its free
b) its what i use on my servers at work so i'm very familiar with it
c) it works well
d) it watches itself/the pc its running on and sends alerts if any issues are found


and i know i'll use some of the other monitors around the house too...

but yeah, i'm sure more everyone else would feel better breaking out notepad and writing a script i prefer not to reinvent the wheel

3/21/2009 2:39:06 PM