OCUK New product alert thingy ma bob

Xplo

Xplo

Xplo

Associate
Joined
20 Nov 2004
Posts
1,647
Location
UK
Hey

I heard recently that someone said they had coded something so when an new product was added to ocuk (in this instance i think it was aimed for b grade) he was informed straight away through email or whatever. Im interested in this and was wondering if anybody could shed some more light on it.

Cheers
 

Augmented

Augmented

Augmented

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
5,464
Location
London Town
I've not seen anything posted regarding this, but it would be fairly elementary to do with a scripting language like PHP or Perl.

Since OcUK don't offer XML/RSS feeds of their product listings, each product listing page would need to be screen-scraped at timed intervals and compared to previous versions. Any changes and additions would then need to be extracted and mailed out. Potential issues faced would be the really crufty markup that the Actinic templating uses making it difficult to write code that could efficiently and accurately pick out new/changed products.

One important point is respecting the potential impact such an application could pose to the website. OcUK (or any commercial entity) may not appreciate having their website continually hit with such traffic - insignificant as it would likely to be - and it may breach terms-of-use policies and such.

It would be better to suggest that OcUK offer some kind of XML feed for their product lines, allowing users to get immediate updates via screenreader software.
 
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