Notifier

Inspiration

While applying to universities, I would find myself constantly checking places like theroadtoengineering to see if there were any new posts or updates on Waterloo admissions - carrying out this task manually was not fun. When waiting for backgrounders to be uploaded when I was in the Model UN club preparing for upcoming conferences, I would constantly check the conference website to see if the directors had finally uploaded them or not - once again, manually carrying out this task was not fun. These are just examples of some of the many scenarios where I found myself manually checking webpages to see if there were any updates. I knew webscrapers already existed, but there was no way to easily implement them to get any sort of notification on when a webpage changes.

What it does

Notifier monitors a set of websites that the user inputs and graphically determines whether or not the webpage has changed; if the webpage has changed significantly, the user will receive a desktop notification indicating the website that there has been an update on.

How we built it

Notifier was built in Python 3 using the plyer, openpyxl, thread, playwright, and PIL libraries.

Challenges we ran into

There were many challenges: sometimes changes would be detected even though there was no actual change to the website; sometimes the whole system would crash (yes, the whole computer would freeze up and start glitching); sometimes files were not being written to or read from; and sometimes the libraries simply would not support a feature I intended on using.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm quite proud of being able to switch libraries and tools quickly and building a tool that discretely runs in the background, making it something I can actually use in my daily life.

What we learned

I learned a LOT of new libraries - in fact, majority of the libraries I used were ones I had never even heard of before.

What's next for Notifier

Notifier has a lot ahead of it! Specifically, I would like to spend some more time to implement persistent sessions and cookies so that even websites with a login screen can be used with Notifier.

Built With

• python