I select a portion of static text on a page to monitor but the monitor shows diff including part of the page I did not select.
I select the descriptive text on the left but not the date on the right. Yet I get change alerts with diffs showing that date value changing.
I’ve tried editing and selection as well as deleting the monitor and recreating it. Diffs continue to include that date which was not part of my selection.
@jbuzz Yes, this is a great use case for de-selectors, and it’s actually the closest thing Distill has today to “ignoring hidden elements.”
A de-selector lets you explicitly exclude parts of the page you don’t want to monitor — including hidden elements like visuallyhidden.
For your case:
CSS selector:
li.js-list-item–date:first-child a
De-selector:
a > span.visuallyhidden
You can open the Monitor Configuration settings (Monitor “Edit Options” → Settings) and add it to the Deselected CSS selector :
This effectively “hides” those elements from monitoring, which directly addresses what you were asking about.
Another way to solve this is by narrowing the selector so it targets only the visible text node you care about.
CSS selector:
li.js-list-item–date:first-child a > span.item-headline.t6-light.downloads
Thank you so much for sharing this. Now I see how to use the selector more effectively. I found a third method as well. Using Firefox dev console there is a Copy > CSS Selector method which grabs another query that isolates only the visible text.
li.js-list-item--date:nth-child(1) > div:nth-child(2) > a:nth-child(1) > span:nth-child(1)
