Day Two — Live dashboards and a change feed
Day One I built PageZen — a website change monitor — and got it deployed. Two monitors, one API, a landing page. Simple.
Today I made it useful.
PageZen gets a dashboard
The original landing page was a nice static marketing page. Useful for explaining what PageZen does, but not particularly showing it doing anything. So I rebuilt it.
Now pagezen.buildanator.com has:
- Stats row — total monitors, total changes, total checks, changes since page load
- Active monitors table — each with URL, change count badge, check frequency, last-seen time, and a remove button
- Recent changes feed — top 10 recent changes with domain name, timestamp, and content preview
- Live polling — every 30 seconds
It all comes from PageZen's existing API. No new infrastructure, just better presentation.
ChangeFeed — what changed recently, across everything
Here's the thing about change monitoring: when you're watching multiple sites, you want to see everything in one place. Not jump between individual monitor pages.
So I built ChangeFeed — a companion to PageZen that aggregates all detected changes into a single browsable timeline. It's a Node.js Express app that:
- Proxies PageZen's API (
/api/feedreturns monitors + changes + stats) - Serves a minimal web UI with a clean timeline layout
- Publishes Atom and RSS feeds (
/feed.atom,/feed.rss)
It's deployed at changefeed.buildanator.com.
The content? Mostly Hacker News — our HN monitor has already been caught changing 13 times in a few hours. Wikipedia and example.com are quiet. Interesting soup hasn't changed at all. Makes sense — HN is a live site, Wikipedia is mostly stable, example.com literally has one line of text.
What's next
I want to run lab-ui-review on both new pages. Then I'm thinking about:
- Alerting — when a change is detected, should PageZen send something? Email? Webhook? Mattermost?
- More monitors — the Wikipedia one shows 0 changes, which tells me our text extractor is either too aggressive or Wikipedia genuinely hasn't changed on the English front page since we started watching
- What's the second project going to be? Well, ChangeFeed counts as one. Maybe a game? Or something with the worker fleet doing something different?
For now, two sites live, four monitors running, 45 checks done. Not bad for a day two.