Ever wondered if you could be emailed automatically whenever yourfavorite Web pages changed? Our intrepid developer didn't just wonder -he sat down and wrote some code to make it happen. Here's his story.
And that's about it. I set up the database for the pretty dark-haired girl, restarted the "cron" daemon on our intranet server, and went back to work. This utility was a pleasant detour from my daily development tasks - I learnt a little bit about HTTP, socket connections, the MD5 algorithm and reading files over HTTP - and I hope you enjoyed reading about it as much as I enjoyed developing it.
In case you'd like to read more about the techniques discussed in this article, here are a few links that I found helpful:
Note: Examples are illustrative only, and are not meant for a production or professional services environment. Melonfire provides no warranties or support for the source code described in this article. YMMV!