Keeping track of updates [Was: browser enhancement suggestion]
Joseph Janos (janos@xensei.com)
Sun, 2 Apr 1995 21:48:52 +0500
Brian Behlendorf <brian@wired.com> writes:
> It occurred to me that a more general solution to all this would be if
> browsers implemented a cron-style auto-fetch functionality - where I could
> say "fetch this URL every day at 3pm and let me know if it changes". The
> browser would present the fetched pages in a menu the same way a mail reader
> presents mail messages. I set my auto-fetch function to grab stock
> quotes, the cover page of the SF Chronicle home page, and the Sherilyn Fenn
> fanclub home page every night at 3am, and when I come into work that morning
> I'll see a menu of that information the same way I sit down to the 50
> messages on the WWW mailing lists. Furthermore, I'll only get the Sherilyn
> Fenn home page *when*it's*changed*, and if it gets a 302 Redirect it'll
> change the URL without even telling me. For those who don't leave their
> netscapes running at night, it can keep a record of the last job it
> performed and at launch perform the rest up to the current time.
I just released a program, doing something like this. It is not integrated into
a browserm rather it is a separate client. You can specify the URLs in an HTML
document (Netscape will do this for you), feed the document into the program,
give a date after which you consider the URL to be new and the program will
generate an HTML documents with the updated URLs (overnight if you wish.) It is
not the 'mail' paradigm, more like the Web (html) paradigm - you get a
document which
you can feed into your browser.
Please visit http://www.specter.com/users/janos/webwatch/index.html
Joseph Janos