Safari Page Monitor

[Last updated 2003-02-04]

This AppleScript keeps an eye on one or more web pages through Safari, reloading them at specified intervals and reporting any changes it detects, both verbally and through a session log file.

I wrote this script to keep tabs on my brother's home page after they had had their first baby and started posting pictures. I remembered a page-monitoring feature in the Classic version of Internet Explorer and decided Safari needed something comparable. I am releasing it to the public domain now because I think I have taken it about as far as it can go as a regular script application. To improve it further, I would need to bring it into AppleScript Studio and tack on a user interface.

Download

spm1.0.3.dmg

Usage

There are two ways to use Safari Page Monitor.

The old way:

Open each page you want to monitor in its own window in Safari.
Run Safari Page Monitor to track those pages for changes.

The new way:

Make a web location file for each page you want to monitor.
Drag a selection of these files onto the Safari Page Monitor application.

A web location file is what you get when you click on the favicon (the small icon to the left of the web address line at the top of any Safari window) and drag it onto the desktop. Whenever you drag these files onto Safari Page Monitor, it forgets whatever it was tracking before and starts monitoring the new ones instead.

Setting preferences

In its present state, Safari Page Monitor is a basic AppleScript with little in the way of a user interface. Eventually, I will probably migrate it to a full-fledged AppleScript Studio application with some sort of configuration dialog for setting preferences. In the meantime, however, I have come up with a primitive scheme for adjusting certain settings.

You can enter application preferences in the Finder comments of the Safari Page Monitor application. (Click on the application file and select Get Info from the File menu. The Comments field is at the bottom of the Info window.) You can also enter page-specific preferences in the Finder comments of your web location files. The following preference parameters have been defined thus far:

Parameter Location Default Value Description

quiet application file none Suppress the voice reports generated by Safari Page Monitor.

passive application file none Normally, SPM re-opens any pages it is tracking should you happen to close them. In passive mode, it keeps a lower profile, reporting that the page could not be found but taking no further action until you open it up again manually.

verbose application file none Provide a more detailed log of what SPM is doing. (Fear not, however; verbose does not make it actually talk any more!)

noconsole application file none Suppress bringing up the Console utility to show Safari Page Monitor's log file.

reload web location file 10 The number of minutes between page reloads.

sensitivity web location file 1 The number of lines of web page text which must change before the change will be reported. The default 1 therefore means any change will be reported.

Parameter	Location	Default Value	Description
quiet	application file	none	Suppress the voice reports generated by Safari Page Monitor.
passive	application file	none	Normally, SPM re-opens any pages it is tracking should you happen to close them. In passive mode, it keeps a lower profile, reporting that the page could not be found but taking no further action until you open it up again manually.
verbose	application file	none	Provide a more detailed log of what SPM is doing. (Fear not, however; verbose does not make it actually talk any more!)
noconsole	application file	none	Suppress bringing up the Console utility to show Safari Page Monitor's log file.
reload	web location file	10	The number of minutes between page reloads.
sensitivity	web location file	1	The number of lines of web page text which must change before the change will be reported. The default 1 therefore means any change will be reported.

Each preference parameter is a single word, and you should separate multiple parameters with spaces. For those which require a value, the value should be in the word following the parameter name. So "reload 10 sensitivity 2" (without the quotes) would have the page reload every 10 minutes and report changes when two or more lines change.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I quit Safari Page Monitor?
Click on its icon in the Dock and choose Quit from the File menu (or hit Apple-Q). If it is in the middle of something, there may be a short delay before it actually quits.
Do I need to have this "Console" thing running all the time?
No. Console is a Mac OS X utility for displaying log files, and Safari Page Monitor uses it to show you its own activity log. You can quit it at any time and no harm will come. You can even tell SPM to stop bringing it up by clicking on SPM's icon (when it is NOT running), choosing Get Info from the File menu, opening the Comments section near the bottom, and typing in "noconsole" (without the quotes).

If you want to view the SPM log again, run Console again, go to Open Quickly in the File menu, and choose ~/Library/Logs followed by SafariPageMonitor.log. (Power users may track recent changes to a log file over a remote connection from another computer by typing something like "tail -f ~/Library/Logs/SafariPageMonitor.log" in the Terminal.)
Can I have a page keep reloading without being told of changes?
There are two ways you can do this. You can suppress the voice alerts altogether by placing Safari Page Monitor in silent mode. To do this, you need to click on SPM's icon (when it is NOT running), choose Get Info from the File menu, open the Comments section near the bottom, and type "silent" (without the quotes).

This turns off the speech functions for the SPM as a whole, but maybe you only want to turn it off for one particular web page? If you are using a web location file to open the page (see "The new way" under Usage), you might try using a very high sensitivity threshold. For example, Get Info on the file and enter "sensitivity 1000". That means 1000 lines of text in the web page will have to change before SPM verbally reports the change to you.

Version History

v1.0.3 (2003-02-04)
- Added a noconsole application preference to suppress the Console utility from launching when you run SPM. You can still open the Console yourself, of course.
- Something I did with this version seems to have made the script work under OS X 10.2.8 again, at least on my test machine. Yay! (I still cannot edit the script in pre-10.3 systems, however. Says the text is too long or something. Could it be that I have crossed some 32K limit in source length? Sounds like OS 9!)
v1.0.2 (2003-12-16)
- Fixed a minor problem in the way the number of changed lines in a web page is tallied up.
- Discovered something I did to the script at some point has made it incompatible with pre-10.3 systems. (I can't even open the script in the 10.2 Script Editor, which could make this rather difficult to debug!)
v1.0.1 (2003-12-15)
- Fixed a bug which was causing multiple pages to reload at the same time the way they used to.
- Set the maximum time the script can go to sleep to 60 seconds, even if there is nothing scheduled to occur for longer than that. This keeps the script more responsive when web location files are dragged onto it.
- SPM now gets timing information from the system for more accurate reload scheduling.
v1.0 release (2003-12-14)
- This version has everything I wanted in the basic AppleScript.
- Can set different reload rates for each web location file.
- Added a quiet mode for suppressing voice updates.
- SPM will now attempt to open pages it cannot find in Safari (unless you use the "passive" flag to get the old behaviour).
- Added a verbose logging mode.
- No longer attempts to quit itself (in passive mode) after Safari quits, since this feature never worked properly anyway.
v1.0b6 (2003-12-11)
- Added a feature wherein you can adjust the sensitivity of how many lines in the web page text must change before the change gets reported.
- Fixed the initialization problem from v1.0b5 (I hope!).
- SPM is more intelligent about ignoring special pages in Safari, such as blank pages and the Bookmarks page.
v1.0b5 (2003-12-02)
- I have discovered my logic for testing if the script has already been initialized is unreliable. Until I figure out a better way, I will have to re-initialize everything every time you drag web links onto the script. C'est la vie!
v1.0b4 (2003-11-28)
- You can now drag Web Internet Location files onto the Safari Page Monitor icon to tell it which pages to monitor. See The new way section under Usage for more details.
v1.0b3 (2003-11-27)
- Safari Page Monitor now keeps a session log at ~/Library/SafariPageMonitor.log. You can view the progress of the script by opening this file in the Console utility.
- SPM now quits when it detects that Safari has quit. (There may be some delay before this happens, since SPM spends much of its time asleep and must wake up before it notices anything has happened.)
v1.0b2 (2003-11-25)
- If you were tracking multiple pages in beta 1, they would all load at the same time, causing a large and sometimes disruptive spike in network activity. I realized it would be better if they loaded at staggered times, and implemented a reload scheduler to the script.
- The script has been reorganized to be more object-oriented.
- Several minor bugs nabbed along the way.
v1.0b1 (2003-11-21)
- First version released to general public.

Known Issues

Cannot find pages in background tabs
This is unfortunately due to a limitation in Safari's scripting interface, and will hopefully be addressed by Apple in the future. As it is, SPM can only see the currently active tab in any tabbed window.
Some pages are too unpredictable to be tracked for changes
Certain web pages like some commercial news sites fluctuate in an annoyingly random way (perhaps to cycle through the ads from their sponsers?) even when the headlines remain the same. I am trying to think of a way to separate the substance of the page from this background noise and track only the useful areas for changes, but it is a difficult problem not unlike filtering out spam in your e-mail.
Problems with file sharing
I have encountered some errors when working with a copy of Safari Page Monitor and/or web location files which reside on a network drive. I have no idea why this would be a problem; it sounds like it might be a bug in AppleScript, but who knows?

Distribution

Safari Page Monitor is freeware. It may be used and distributed in its unmodified form, but not sold. You may make modifications to the script for your own personal use, but I ask that you submit to me any changes you would like to see in the public distribution, as it is important to me to retain version control.