Monitor
Magpie snapshots the page on your schedule and tells you exactly what moved — while it runs, even from the tray.
On this page
Add a watch
- Open Watch. Paste the URL.
- Pick an interval — 5m, 15m, 1h, 6h, 24h, or custom… for any number of minutes (one minute to a year).
- Press Watch.
The Advanced drawer adds a Name (shown instead of the URL), Send changes to (one registered webhook endpoint), Render (auto, static, browser) and Accept-Language for locale-variant pages. A watch counts once against the trial, when you add it.
The table
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Every | The interval |
| Last checked | When the scheduler last fetched it |
| Changed | pending before the first check; then same, changed, or stale (three intervals overdue) — a failing badge rides along while checks error, with the error on hover |
| Next check | When it will run next, or paused |
| Hook | A dot when changes route to a webhook |
Row actions: Check now (runs a check immediately), Pause/Resume, View diff, and delete behind a confirm.
The drawer
Click a row for the detail drawer:
- Last change — the word diff of the most recent change, kept across restarts.
- Snapshot history — every check with its content hash and a changed yes/no. Snapshots live in the local store, so the diff survives a relaunch.
- Open in Compare — deep-links the URL and its newest snapshot into the Compare screen for a two-side diff.
- Editable Name and Send changes to, each with its own save button.
The scheduler checks at most two pages at once on a 30-second tick, with one check bounded at five minutes. Diff text is capped at 4 KB for display; the full snapshots are on disk.
Keep it running
Watches check while the app is open. To make that “always”:
- Keep running in the tray when closed — Settings → Background. Closing hides Magpie; quit from the tray menu.
- Start at login — opens hidden in the tray alongside the above.
- Notify when a watch changes — an OS notification whose Open action raises the window.
Where the desktop offers no tray or notification server, the toggles read off and say so.
Notify somewhere else
Send changes to any HTTP endpoint — n8n, Slack, Zapier, your own server — through the signed webhook registry in Settings → Webhooks. A watch can route to one endpoint specifically, or endpoints can subscribe to every watch.changed. Crawl endings can fire the same way (crawl.finished, crawl.failed).
The CLI’s magpie watch --once is the cron/systemd-timer equivalent, with an unsigned --webhook of its own (CLI reference).