Website Tracking Program

Hi,

I would like to see if anyone is interested.
Let me know what you think, and how much you would charge.
You can PM me your price.

HERE IS MY ORIGINAL QUESTION BELOW:



I was hoping someone could help out.

Is there a way to track certain changes to other websites?

I work for a manufacturers sales rep firm. Ideally, we want to rep the best manufacturers'. If you can imagine, the best are usually already taken, unless that manufacturer feels that rep firm isn't doing well for them. At that point, the rep firm gets dropped, and usually the rep firm will remove them from their website.

Thats where we want to take action and pick up these manufacturers while they are open. However, its very hard to find out without constantly checking every rep firms website. Either that, or just word of mouth.

It would be great if there was a way to track the removal of say, certain links (manufacturer's links) or images from a certain web page. Ideally, we would want to get notified when a change occurs, and then we can go see what link was removed.


For example, thsi rep firm lists all their Manufacturers here:
http://www.yando.com/caline.htm

Say CREE Microwave is removed. We would want some way to be notified when that happens.

Any ideas on how to achieve this?


ANOTHER MEMBERS APPROACH:

This would not necessarily need PHP. If I were doing this I would periodically grab the pages of interest and store them somewhere. I'd then do a diff on the latest page and the corresponding previously stored page. I would then analyze those diff's and make the appropriate notifications.

As a matter of personal preference I would use perl to do this.

Hi mhsiao45.
Don't know Perl much, its language-syntax is much harder than PHP. But I'm sure PHP is sufficient for your project.

First, you might need PHP's CRON job to run a regular check on those pages.

And this would be easier if those are of common type of web pages (static ones, not heavily loaded with dynamic javascript coding). You might have heard of PHP cURL to grab these difficult pages. This is the 2nd.

Third, to compare strings. I think there are some PHP large-strings comparison libs out there you could adapt...

Hendra