Track changes on a webpage that uses POST

Question

There are many free/freemium webservices that send an e-mail notification whenever the content of a certain web page changes; e.g., visualping.io, changedetection.com, onwebchange...

Unfortunately the page I wish to track is the result of a search which is sent using a form via POST. It is a pure search without side effects, so I think that GET should have been used in this case, but it is an external website and I am stuck with it.

Is there a free webservice that can monitor the result of a POST query and send me an e-mail upon changes? Or a software/script that I can host myself? Linux is preferred, in this case.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The free web service http://changemon.com/ has this ability. You can do POST requests to the specified URL by adding a GET-like string to the changemon’s URL field beginning with ?postdata=:

http://website.com/seach?postdata=parameter1:value1,parameter2:value2

See 'Posting data' under 'Tips & Tricks' at their homepage.

Answer 2

1. Check whether GET works. Many websites handle GET and POST requests to the same address equally. You can try this easily by changing the method of the form method from POST to GET and see if that brings the results with the new URL.
2. Use your own software. Sending POST requests is usually not supported by web services because it might be used for malicious purposes, e.g. sending spam. Also many web pages prevent repeated form submissions by using CSRF tokens (which require re-loading the web page that hosts the form). The most popular software with this capability seems to be Web Alert, a free app for Android (however, I do not think that it can send email notifications yet).

I hope that helps you :-)

Answer 3

Just adding to the list of options - www.trackapage.com . It's free, and keeps an archive of historic screenshots as well.