Firefox Extensions

[simms]

Do you know of an extension that checks a list of webpages for some words that you specify and popups a small window that tells you when one has been found?

Like if you want to search for "baby carriage" in your local Craigslist, instead of going to yourcity.craigslist.org and then clicking on the "For Sale" and then typing baby carriage and reading the results, there should be some kind of automated solution...

Or if you want to scope out something at AT FS/T, like a 7900GTX, and instead of typing it in your browser each time and looking at the results, an extension should be able to do that.

Kinda like FW's topic emailing system, but browser based.

I don't know what to type to look for something like this, so do you have it?

 

[MikeMike]

sounds like a fvcking awesome idea.

now someone start typing.

 

[notfred]

You mean an RSS reader?

 

[simms]

Originally posted by: notfred
You mean an RSS reader?

Well, kinda. But not all site offer RSS (like AT and Craigs, for exmaple) so that wouldn't really work.

Plus RSS just updates every so often, maybe this extension would have a little popup like Gmail Notifier to let you know when a new item for "7900GTX" has been posted at the AT Forums (or any other forum...)

So no one's ever heard of this? Certainly someone would have wanted this before.

 

[simms]

Here's a response I got from a newsgroup, but it's too advanced for me to figure out..


I don't think there is an extension that does exactly what you
describe, but I could be wrong. However, this is commonly
referred to as scraping. If you know the URL that is constructed
by the search dialog for the site, you can place it in a script
and use wget with gawk or grep and use the Windows Script Host
to pop up a dialog for you. wget, gawk, and grep are all
available for Windows.

You might have some issues getting WSH to pipe data from tool to
tool AND display graphical dialogs, too. I'm not sure of the
specifics anymore, but if it is a problem, you can always
install ActivePython or ActivePerl and do the same thing.

I had a similar need to monitor a web site and created a short
bash script and forked it to a separate process. It popped up a
dialog whenever the web site contained certain information. It
saved me the trouble of repeatedly checking the web site for
changed data while giving me very timely information.

 

[kamper]

It's called google with the "site:" rule. As in google "baby carriage site:yourcity.craigslist.org". Or just make quicksearches that directly hit the searches that you want.

 

[simms]

Someone on another forum mentioned this, this gives results that are a few days old. A Hot Deal would be picked up by someone else by then.

Aside from making a folder with all these "google" site rules, isn't there an extension that can automatically check for you?