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Help & reference

Quick tour of the moving pieces, in roughly the order you encounter them.

Concepts

Watch

A URL plus a cadence and sensitivity. PingNode checks it on schedule and records a snapshot every time the page changes.

Action

Where alerts go — email (mock), Slack, Discord, ntfy, generic webhook, or the built-in Activity log. Test before saving.

Change event

A diff between two consecutive snapshots whose magnitude crosses the Watch's sensitivity threshold. Annotate it from the Watch detail page.

Tags & views

Slice your Watches with tag pills, status filters, and smart views (Active / Paused / Needs attention / Untagged / Archived).

Tuning a noisy Watch

If a Watch fires too often:

  1. Open the Watch and check the sensitivity back-test — it shows how many recent events would fire at each threshold.
  2. Hover a noisy line in the diff and click ignore. It adds an escaped regex to the ignore-rules list.
  3. Switch the action to digest mode so bursts coalesce instead of paging once per change.
  4. Add quiet hours on the action for overnight breathing room.

Add Watches faster

Bookmarklet

Drag this button to your bookmarks bar. Clicking it on any page opens PingNode with the URL and title pre-filled.

Bookmarklets don't work on mobile — set this up on desktop. The PWA's home-screen icon plus share-sheet "Open with PingNode" cover the mobile flow.

Watch this page
Or copy the JavaScript snippet
javascript:(function(){var u=encodeURIComponent(location.href);var n=encodeURIComponent(document.title||'');var w=window.open('http://localhost:3000/watches/new?url='+u+'&name='+n,'_blank');})()

Shortcuts

Open the in-app overlay any time with ? or the palette with ⌘K.

Command palette⌘K
Toggle shortcut overlay?
New Watchn
Focus page search/
Overviewgd
Watchesgw
Actionsgx
Activityga
Move down (lists)j
Move up (lists)k
Toggle row selectx
Pin / unpin Watchp

Recipes

Track a competitor's pricing page
  1. Create a Watch from the Pricing template.
  2. Set sensitivity to Any change.
  3. Wire a Slack action with a 60-min digest so you get one daily roll-up.
Get pinged when a job is posted
  1. Use the Jobs template (5-min cadence).
  2. Add a CSS selector for the listings table to narrow the diff.
  3. Wire your email or ntfy action with no digest — you want it immediate.
Triaging 30+ Watches
  1. Tag related Watches as you create them.
  2. Use Group by host on the Watches page to spot duplicates.
  3. Star (pin) the few that matter most so they sort to the top.
  4. Stale Watches surface on the Overview's Suggested cleanup card.

Looking for the source code? It's right here in the project directory. Export your data to back it up.