Bug#746556: RFP: MailWebsiteChanges -- Python script to keep track of website updates; sends email notifications and provides RSS2 feed

[DG <debianguru@gmx.de>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist

* Package name    : MailWebsiteChanges
  Version         : 1.7
  Upstream Author : DG <Debianguru@gmx.de>
* URL             : https://github.com/Debianguru/MailWebsiteChanges
* License         : GPL
  Programming Lang: Python
  Description     : Python script to keep track of website updates; sends email
notifications and provides RSS2 feed

Python script to keep track of website changes; sends email notifications on
updates and/or also provides an RSS feed

To specify which parts of a website should be monitored, XPath selectors (e.g.
"//h1"), CSS selectors (e.g. "h1"), and regular expressions can be used (just
choose the tools you like!).

MailWebsiteChanges is related to PageMonitor for Chrome and AlertBox /
Check4Change for Firefox. However, instead of living in your web browser, you
can run it independently from command line / bash and install it as a simple
cron job running on your linux server.

- why is this package useful/relevant?
It can run as a cronjob, frequently polling websites for changes.
The application notifies the user by sending mail messages or updating an RSS2
feed in case of changes.

- is it a dependency for another package?
No.

- do you use it?
Yes, every day. I uploaded it to Github for public availability.

- if there are other packages providing similar functionality, how does it
compare?
There are related tools like urlwatch, however, MailWebsiteChanges offers much
more finegranular features like CSS/XPath/regex parsing of XML/HTML content,
allowing for monitoring specific parts of websites, not just the whole content
that is delivered by the webserver. It also provides an RSS2 feed.

- how do you plan to maintain it? inside a packaging team
I plan to continue development of this tool on github and would be happy to
help packaging it -- however, since I never did packaging before, I would
highly appreciate your help.


Sourcecode is availabile here: https://github.com/Debianguru/MailWebsiteChanges
Requires Python3, lxml, and cssselect