How to monitor only large paragraphs

Help and Support
,
1

I want to monitor current affair information on a certain page. the posts are mostly at least one paragraph long. how can I ignore changes less than that? and how to ignore reaction (like and dislike) changes on social media posts. all I want is track large paragraph texts on different websites and social media platforms. Thanks in advance.

2

@yisukeshit Here are the points that you can consider:

  1. Instead of monitoring the entire page, select only specific parts. Assuming the latest post appears at the top, you can select the top-most post.
  2. De-select the parts that change very frequently, like, timestamps, likes, etc. You can ignore or de-select by making a selection from inside a selection. De-selected parts appear in a red box.

Here is the link to the article about the visual selector: What is Visual Selector? – Distill.
If you need help with the selection on a particular page, you can also post the URL here or DM me.

3

Hey man thank you for your reply I’m a journalist and what I want is to monitor latest news updates from different sites. the ones that have feed is easy to monitor but some websites don’t have rss feeds. what I specifically want is to monitor latest news updates from https://www.ena.et/web/amh/ site what do I do?

4

@yisukeshit One way to monitor the updates from https://www.ena.et/web/amh/ is to add a monitor for each field of your interest by visiting the respecting field page.
For example, for politics, you can select the top most news from Politics - ENA English - ENA

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and similarly for other fields.

5

Hey man Your help is appreciated. by this method can I monitor facebook, and twitter pages? and do I have to select the top most post every time a new post shows up? thanks in advance.

6

Yes, in a similar way, you can monitor other web pages that show posts. For Facebook and Twitter also, you can select the top post and monitor it. However, for these social media pages, the default selector may cease to work after some time as the element’s attribute values change a lot. A custom configuration will work best for them.

For Twitter, you can copy the config as given in the forum post: How to monitor Twitter for user posting a new tweet - #3 by neilbontoft.

For Facebook profiles, the following config should work for monitoring the top-most post:

{
  "selections": [
    {
      "frames": [
        {
          "index": 0,
          "excludes": [],
          "includes": [
            {
              "type": "css",
              "expr": "[data-ad-preview=message]"
            }
          ]
        }
      ],
      "dynamic": true,
      "delay": 5
    }
  ],
  "ignoreEmptyText": true,
  "includeStyle": false,
  "dataAttr": "text"
}
1 Like
7

where should I paste it? and do I say monitor full page or parts of page? I’m new to this so please be patient. thanks.

8

Dear @yisukeshit

I’d recommend you to go through Config and Advanced Options – Distill
Since you are just starting off, I have two additional recommendations:

  1. Go through our detailed documentation: What is Distill? – Distill
  2. Take a look at the videos on your YouTube Playlist

Hope this helps.

Best,
Surya

2 Likes
9

hey man the config worked pretty well but one little problem the Facebook page has featured section on the top of the post so the post i want to monitor is three posts below what should i adjust thanks

10

@yisukeshit Can you DM me the URL?

11

thanks in advance man if you make it work on this i can change for all the facebook pages i want