Follow Bee

Follow Bee is a web contents monitoring utility, meant to aid competitive intelligence (CI). This utility checks the web pages after given time interval, and reports you if it finds any change in the web page contents. The intended users of Follow Bee are higher level executives, marketing personnel, business development executives and all others, whose main information source is the web.

You can use this utility to monitor your competitor’s web pages (like products page, press releases and news, customer wins etc). Whenever this utility finds any change on web pages being monitored, it alerts you, as well as it finds out all the changed locations and shows you the actual change on pages by highlighting them! Thus, you need not worry about what exactly has changed – as this utility is capable of showing it to you.

This utility is being developed as a desktop application. Hence, you need not keep the browsers open all the time, nor you need to manually refresh them or employ anybody to do this checking for you. Install this, and that’s it!

I have designed this utility in such a way that it consumes very lesser space on your desktop. It also have many configurable options such as, time interval between two subsequent checks, when to notify you (ranging from ‘Notify Always’ to ‘Notify only if change found’ to ‘Never Notify’). Follow Bee is planned to get released on 26th January 2010, but there can be a slight change in the release date, if needed.

Website Crawler

One of my customers wanted something to crawl complete website and collect all the links matching with given regular expression. So I came up with this website crawler application.

As the customer was also from the technical field, I could develop GUI which accepts the starting point – start URL – and the regular expression to check against. Once the application starts crawling the given website, it checks each hyper link and if it is matching with the given expression, it adds it to the bucket. In the end, it exports the result bucket as CVS file.

Some web sites detect the automated program by observing the time duration between two requests sent for different web pages on the site. And if they suspect any IP address sending such requests, they simply deny the contents. This application is designed so as to work in such situations as well. The application waits for random number of seconds (3 to 7 seconds) before sending next request. Thus, it imitates human browsing.