Tag: Diff

Beyond Compare

Beyond Compare is one of those programs that essentially does one job, but it does that one job so well that it is well worth its $60 price tag.

The software focuses on comparing files and folders and letting the user drill down into specific differences that can be merged, exported, reported on, etc.

I maintain several processes in which I need to drill down to specific differences between different versions of large text files. There are a lot of tools I could (and have) used to do this, but Beyond Compare makes it trivially easy to set up a particular filter for just the changes I need to monitor. Then I point Beyond Compare at the files, and in a few seconds, I have an exportable list of just the differences that I’m interested in for the next part of the process.

Versionista.Com

Versionista recently showed up in the top results from del.icio.us, which made me laugh out loud. Versionista monitors web sites and not only alerts you when they change, but also shows you exactly how they changed. Sounds like I’ll switch to that, instead of Google Reader, for surfing Boing! Boing!

The Versionista home page highlights changes that the McCain and Obama campaigns have made to their respective websites, usually to hide embarassing material (well, technically McCain’s site is still up so they’re not hiding all the embarassing material).

I am, sadly, a version whore. When WordPress implemented versioning in 2.6, I was in heaven. Also, even though I know I don’t need to be so obsessive about it, I can’t help but generate and download a full site backup of this server every night . . . which in my case is a 12gb .tar file at the moment.

Anyway, I could not find any pricing on the Versionista web page, and didn’t feel like setting up an account. From other articles on the service, it is free to monitor two pages for changes. Anything beyond that involves monthly fees in the $16-$500/month rate. It would probably be as cheap to hire a college kid to write up a CURL-based tool to do the regular downloads and feed those into any number of diff products like HTML diff.