Can Stillio track changes, and only screenshot when the page has changed?

The world today is highly dynamic, and so is the web. As important as tracking webpage change is, we do not support it. The complexities attached to these changes are enormous and hence not our primary focus. Further speaking, the word change here can mean a lot of things. It may be that a webpage has completely undergone a design re-engineering or just a slight change of text on the page.

Stillio is concerned about webpage capturing  as the page is and archiving it for a longer period of time as against watching for changes that happen on the page.

Let's look at two main categories of content that can change to any webpage, namely irrelevant content and relevant content changes.

Irrelevant content

Let's assume you are tracking a webpage that contains Google ads. We can classify these ads as irrelevant content because nobody likes them (except you want to use Stillio to archive ads being shown, of course 😜).

The ads are rendered dynamically on the page based on Google's algorithms. Since these ads can change anytime on the page without the page's original contents actually changing, monitoring this kind of page may be very misleading and full of hassle.

You will end up paying for a service without getting real value for your money because these ads keep changing (you get notified of the changes and still get charged - because a change actually happened) and still not satisfying your needs. AI can be used to mitigate such a problem but that is beyond the scope of Stillio at the moment. 

Relevant content

There are times when the contents of a page change, but the change that occurred may not be of high interest for your use case. An example is when a background color of a section of a page changes from white to blue. So, here the content of the page actually changed, but again, it's not the kind of change that would be grossly significant for your use case. 

You may probably be thinking of a solution whereby you specify certain conditions to be met before you get notified of any change that happens on the page. This would definitely work in some cases, but will not be 100 percent accurate because your conditions will not be exhaustive. We are talking about so many false positives here. 

Solution

Since monitoring webpage changes is not our primary target here at Stillio, it doesn't mean that there are no services that address this challenge. For this same issue, you can use a third-party service like www.wachete.com to monitor webpage changes that happen within a twinkle of an eye and still use Stillio for capturing and storing your webpage archives.