This is a python app to monitor some web page containing static content thats not supposed to change. To use this, run it with the name of the control page as the first parameter and the second parameter should be the test page thats being evaluated. At the moment only <li>, <title>, <div>, <link> and <span> are checked by default, but its trivial to add check for more html tags.

Sample session

$ python dinnerplate.py  --test http://www.example.com   --control ok.html --notify [email protected] 
$ 

No news is good news, if the page had an alien edit (addition or removal,)

$ python dinnerplate.py  --test http://www.example.com   --control ok.html  --notify [email protected]
 here lies the culprit <li class="top"><a href="#Top" title="Back to Top">Top</a></li> thats been added
$

The application goes through the page and identifies all the elements that have beed added /removed and prints(+/emails) out what it finds.

###NB: this is a blocking app, it will hold the terminal till you hit Ctrl-C later i will turn it into an init.d service. by default, but see below on turning it into a service.

To run this create a python file names defaults.py and in it place the default values that you use in this format

myurl = 'http://example.com'
myokfile = 'ok.html'
myemail = ['[email protected]','[email protected]']

The app can be configured to be an init.d service on systems with lsb not rh-lsb, all that should be done is:

1. edit the path to the dinnerplate.py script in the shell script named dinnerplated and
2. alter the path to your python executable in dinnerplate.py,
3. copy the dinnerplated file to (typically) /etc/init.d/ you can then start the service with the command service dinnerplated start or the other usual options.

##Convenience You can create a control file using the hotpot.py script:

$ python hotpot.py --control='http://example.com' >> ok.html

Its not perfect, seems to have a bug, the user must be in the directory where the python scipts are, as well as the control html document before it works properly.

i hope to add more functionality, docs and clean up the code Cheers mike