web-monitor

What This Skill Does

The Web Monitor Pro skill is a powerful, autonomous web scraping and tracking engine designed to keep you updated on the digital world. At its core, the tool monitors specific URLs for changes, whether it is a price drop on a consumer product, a restock notification for a limited item, or general content updates on a news site or blog. Unlike simple notification tools, this skill includes an intelligent processing layer that provides change summaries, side-by-side visual diffs, and historical price tracking with sparklines. It is highly flexible, supporting standard curl-based requests for static sites and Playwright-powered JS rendering for dynamic, modern web applications. Users can organize monitors into groups, apply custom CSS selectors to focus on specific elements, and integrate with external platforms via webhooks. All data is managed locally in your environment, ensuring privacy and control.

Installation

To begin, ensure you have the OpenClaw environment set up. You can install the skill by running the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/jakes420/web-monitor-pro

Once installed, the first step should always be to run the quickstart command:

python3 scripts/monitor.py quickstart

This will configure your local data directory, detect your available fetch engines (like Playwright or curl), and provide personalized suggestions for the most common monitoring scenarios. This initialization step ensures that the skill is perfectly tuned to your system's capabilities.

Use Cases

1. Consumer Finance: Track the price of electronics or luxury goods across multiple retailers to ensure you buy when the price is lowest.
2. Inventory Management: Monitor "out of stock" pages for high-demand items, receiving instant alerts the moment inventory is replenished.
3. Content Aggregation: Stay updated on blog post updates, software documentation changes, or competitive analysis by monitoring specific sections of a webpage.
4. Workflows: Group monitors by project or category (e.g., 'Work', 'Wishlist') to keep your alerts organized and searchable.

Example Prompts

• "Can you watch the price of this laptop for me? https://example.com/product-page. I want to be alerted if it drops below $500."
• "List all my active monitors and check if the stock status for the items in my 'wishlist' group has changed."
• "I need to track the updates on this documentation page. Use the browser engine to make sure you capture the dynamic content, and send a notification to my Discord webhook."

Tips & Limitations

• Efficiency: Use the default interval (360 minutes) for most tasks, but lower it for critical restock alerts. Be mindful of aggressive polling, which can lead to IP bans from target websites.
• Selectors: If a page is complex, use the --selector flag with specific CSS IDs (e.g., #price-tag) to ensure the agent only alerts you to relevant changes.
• JS Rendering: Always use the --browser flag for sites built with React, Vue, or Angular, as these pages require JavaScript execution to load their data.
• Limitations: The skill is highly capable, but it is not a bypass for bot-detection mechanisms. For extremely high-frequency monitoring or heavily protected sites, you may need to adjust your fetch strategy or headers.