Changes

The Changes log at the bottom of the Monitor window contains a table listing any changes for the tests. As with the checks table, if no tests are selected, the changes from all tests are listed; if some or one are selected, only the changes from those selected tests are listed. The columns can be sorted, and the order toggled, as desired. This table is mainly interesting to see how often a site changes, or when a previous change occurred.

Also included is a search field. This is useful to refine the information shown in the table even further. You can select one or more tests in the tests table, then enter some text in the search field to view just the table lines that contain that text.

Changes are detected via the filters feature. Any number of filters can look at the output of the service, and can optionally look for changes from the previous time they checked – Simon keeps track of the previous text for each filter. See the Filters page for more information.

Here are the details of the columns:

Change Date

This column displays the date and time that the change occurred, or more precisely when Simon checked the site and detected the change, using the criteria specified in the Test Info pane.

Difference

This column displays the new text from between the start and end change detection text. It intelligently shows only the part of the text that is different than before, if the changed text is quite long. If it is very short, it shows the entire changed text.

Test Name

This column displays the name of the test that this relates to; useful when displaying changes for multiple tests.