Konfabulator Widget for showing DU threads?

[dsewell]

Warning: if you are not a Mac OS X user, read no further!

If you use Konfabulator, you know that many of the widgets people have created for it are used to display headlines from RSS feeds on one's desktop. Now, DU doesn't offer RSS feeds. However, in principle it should be possible to write some code to download the latest threads page, parse it to extract the first ten new threads or so, and then pass these to a widget, refreshing the display at intervals of 10 minutes or whatever.

To do this properly would mean reasonable skill with JavaScript, which unfortunately I don't have... though I can see one way of doing all this by relying on runCommand to call external programs like curl and Perl to do most of the heavy lifting.

Any Mac-friendly JavaScript gurus out there who've already done something like this? If not, any Mac users who'd be interested in a DU Konfabulator widget if I could get one to work?

[gold_bug]

1. it's a good idea

I've never even tried Konfabulator and don't know how widgets are made/scripted for it. Maybe I'll look at their website.

Regarding RSS for DU, I thought globalfreepress.com had some method of doing that. Check their website. Or this:
http://globalfreepress.com/rss/du.rss

[dsewell]

3. Thanks for the globalfreepress tip

I didn't know about that RSS file. It only shows the "Late Breaking News" threads, though.

You know, this might be the way to go, now that I think about it. It's not a difficult programming job to grab a web page and create an RSS file from the relevant links. I could do that pretty easily, put it on my web server, and run a cron job to update it regularly ... only I probably couldn't publicize it because I don't have the bandwidth to have everyone grabbing it from my site. The advantage of the dedicated widget is that you'd be connecting directly to DU for updates.

Hmm, well, probably the time I'm wasting thinking about all this would be better spent campaigning for Democratic candidates.

[Syrinx]

2. I've thought about making something like that

Not for Konfabulator, since I don't have OS X, but just a widget of some sort, probably using wxPython. I haven't got around to it yet, though. :(

[Ellen Forradalom]

4. Lemme check out the reference

I'm a MacOS X user, a Unix geek and a Perl hacker.

[Ellen Forradalom]

5. Lemme check out the reference

I'm a MacOS X user, a Unix geek and a Perl hacker.