11 replies to this topic

[suicidal pencil]

School is comming to a close, and I'm starting to become overloaded with work. Meaning that I wont have time to check the twenty or so forums I belong to.

I've decided to create a perl script that would go to each and every site, list new posts, alert me to PMs, and then write it into a .txt file.

My question is: how would I go about this? I know how I would write information to a file, but I'm inexperianced with CGI :o. I'm not actually sure of where to start from.

Could anyone point me in a direction?

[v0id]

It can be hard to make such script, because forums are made differently and the structure of the underlying HTML is not necessarily the same from forum to forum. I would instead concentrating on the forums providing RSS feeds. In that way you'll only have to care about a single structure.

If you don't want to make a RSS parser yourself, you can use an already existing one. You may want to look into XML::RSS and eventually XML::RSS::Parser::Lite if you want a simpler interface.

[suicidal pencil]

There are four sites that I'm worried about.

z11.invisionfree.com/conflagrationV_M_G
z14.invisionfree.com/playr_forums
The Defectors Clan • Index page
and this one.

I know that forums.defectorsclan.com uses PHP, but I'm not entirely sure about this one (I think PHP again...not sure though), and the zx.invisionfree.com/xxxxxx sites are completly unknown to me.

[suicidal pencil]

I'm making this mostly because I think it would be a wicked thing if I achieve it ;)...but it would also help me decide if I need to make an appearance on a particular site.

[v0id]

"suicidal pencil" said:

There are four sites that I'm worried about.

Both "thedefectorsclan" and CodeCall has RSS feeds. Here they are:

http://forum.codecal...l.php?type=RSS2
Latest posts from “The Defectors Clan” board.

I wasn't even able to open the other sites, so I can't say whether they have or not.

[suicidal pencil]

playr.co.uk
Conflagration V M G (<- I think it's PHP <_<)

[v0id]

It seems like they don't have RSS feeds, at least I haven't found them.

[fahlyn]

What's wrong with just using the forum's email notification features? Most sites frown on "page scraping"....which is what it sounds like you're trying to do.

[suicidal pencil]

I'm doing this mostly for the convenience, but I'm also doing it to teach myself more perl.

[Sionofdarkness]

fahlyn said:

What's wrong with just using the forum's email notification features? Most sites frown on "page scraping"....which is what it sounds like you're trying to do.

That sounds like it would do the job just fine.