I want to write a little program that will give me an update whenever a webpage changes. Like I want to see if there is a new ebay listing under a certain category and then send an email to myself. Is there any clean way to do this? I could set up a program and run it on a server somewhere and have it just poll ebay.com every couple of minutes or seconds indefinitely but I feel like there should be a better way. This method could get dicey too if I wanted to monitor a variety of pages for updates.
There is no 'clean' way to do this.
You must relay on CURL or file_get_context() with context options in order to simply get data from URL, and, in order to notify you when content of URL is changed, you must store in database snapshots of page you are listening. Lately you are comparing new version of crawled content with earlier created snapshot and, if change in significant parts of DOM are detected, that should be trigger for your mail notifier function.
Create an listener on a 3rd party's web page