what is this advanced feature called?

[grasswire]

Picture a text box that updates real time on your web site -- perhaps sort of like a headline news. You are updating it manually every few minutes, taking the text from another web site where people are posting.

If you wanted to know the html code to create such a real-time feature, what would you look for? What's it called?

[Syrinx]

1. it sounds like maybe you are referring to "screen scraping"

If so, it's really more of a problem for a scripting language like Python or PHP, than for HTML.

Screen scraping is the process of extracting human-readable data from websites by parsing HTML code.

I'm not sure if that's what you are talking about though.

If you're really talking about actually displaying text like one of those news tickers on TV, then you will want to look at the "marquee" tag.

http://www.htmlmarquee.com/

I hope one of those ideas is what you're looking for.

[grasswire]

2. hmmmmm

Thanks for your reply.

What I am looking for is something that reads up and down, not horizontally disappearing like marquis, and does not repeat. In other words, it is updated as new posts are made, and the post might be a few sentences and then disappear when a new one comes in.

Does that make any sense at all? I guess I need to go look at twitter and see what they are using.

[Why Syzygy]

3. Like the "Latest Page" at DU? nt

[Syrinx]

5. okay, I get it now

I guess you would most likely use Java, or maybe Javascript to do that.

Apparently Twitter uses a combination of Java, Ruby On Rails, and a language called Scala (a new one to me), to build their site.

Do you care to explain specifically what you are trying to do? If not, I completely understand.

Good luck!

[grasswire]

7. here's the thing

Someone involved in a project is trying to create a box (let's call it A) on a web site where posts from various social networking sites about a topic are collected and posted in box A nearly in real time. It has to have the ease of a blog, where one person regularly accesses it and updates it.

[charlie]

6. If Twitter's the site

you want to do whatever it is you're trying to do, scraping the user's RSS feed might be easiest. Since Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters, the full text is included in each RSS summary. Pull everything between <description> tags and you have all the recent tweets from that user.

[Duer 157099]

4. I would start by searching for "chat" related scripts

I get the idea of what you're describing, which most closely resembles a chat box, yes?

Except that instead of "chatters" posting to it, you want to get text from somewhere specific, like Twitter.

[Why Syzygy]

8. There is something similar

to what you describe on this site > http://ran.org/
It looks like the topics are pre loaded, but it might be adaptable?