Somebody on dilbert.com (might have been Scott Adams) was looking for an application that would set a browser to cycle through a list of sites until the user clicked on the page to read it. This bugged me off and on for over a year.

The logic is simple. The easiest way would be using JavaScript and frames. Of course, I have better things to do with my time than staring at a monitor waiting to click when somebody posts new content. I wanted the computer to do the work and let me know when a page changed.

Between redsquirrel's recent Auto-Surfer, an old post from kilinrax, and The Mouse Book, I put together the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use LWP::UserAgent;

my $pageNew;

# I used the US version of http://www.theregister.co.uk/ as an example
my $siteName = 'http://www.theregus.com'; 

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;

my $request = HTTP::Request->new('GET', "$siteName");
my $pageOld = $ua->request($request);

while() {
   
   sleep 1800; # 30 Minutes
   
   $pageNew = $ua->request($request);
   
   if ($pageOld->content ne $pageNew->content) {
      system('konqueror', $siteName)==0 
         or die "Unable to open browser\n";
         
      $pageOld = $pageNew;
   }         
}

[download]

I know what you are thinking: 'Hooray! Good for ol' Bilfurd!' and possibly 'Get the net, another loony found a keyboard!' You forgot my favorite - 'Here's proof that the Mac made using a PC so easy even an idiot can do it.'

I actually found a use for this involving a luser (I took his keyboard away once already...) and an intranet page showing web statistics. I have a few questions before I install it on his PC:

It should be interesting to see what the monks' collective wisdom yields on this one...

In reply to Simple LWP Exercise by bilfurd

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