Simon 5 is coming soon!
Simon version 5 is currently in beta testing. It is a massive update, introducing a much-requested feature: syncing the Simon data between multiple Macs, plus a Simon Status service, a Link Checker filter, improved Find filter, iMessage and Speak Error notifiers, a new app icon, and much more.
Important: please note that Simon 5 requires a minimum of macOS 10.12 (Sierra), and will be a paid upgrade from Simon 4 after the beta. Purchasers since September 1, 2020 automatically get a version 5 license (that also works in previous versions).
Re: Monitoring changes
Hi Matt,
Getting Simon to email you when a change occurs on a page is very easy, as you've probably already found. You can use the Smart Change Detection feature to look the relevant portion of the page, and output everything between the Start and End blocks.
In the E-mail notifier, you can use the {TestChangeDifferenceWithoutHTML} variable to output the portion of the page that is different from the previous check. Or {TestChangeText} to get everything between the Start and End blocks.
So you could easily get an email listing "[12:00 04/02/09] AIFF Disney-Jingle", which is probably adequate for your needs.
Customizing the output further than that would require more work. You'd either need to create a custom Script-based service to fetch the page via curl and analyze it with grep or similar, and output the desired change text. Or create a custom Script-based notifier to take the output of the {TestChangeText} variable, extract the desired portion, and generate an email.
Another (perhaps easier) way to do it could be to use two tests: a Web-based one to check the page, that uses a Script-based notifier to extract the desired text and write it to a local file. Then another test to watch that file and notify you via email of its contents when it changes.
By the way, in a future version I plan to make this easier, by adding another layer between the test and notifier: a filter. The Smart Change Detection feature will be one of the built-in filters, but there will be others, including the ability to write custom scripts. This will be a very useful enhancement.
David -- Fantastic thank you
David --
Fantastic thank you - I will have a play around and see if that can give me the desired results. It sounds like it should.
When do you think you will be introducing the filter features you mentioned?
Thank you,
Matt
Re: filter features
Sometime this year. I don't have an exact date, and if I did it'd probably change, but I'm currently planning to work on the version that includes that feature (and much more) around August. Simon is an ongoing project, always improving!