If you have an account here (and not much of a life?) you can now pop up a small window that will sit on your desktop and watch the site for you while you work. If something gets posted on a page you are tracking the window will let you know. Just go to /monitor (requires javascript.)
tried this out yesterday and this morning - not exactly sure what happens here, but it seems that when there is a new post, clicking the link in the small monitor window closes that window and opens a new one on the main dmtree page. so the monitor feature is then gone. and i then need to click refresh on the new window main page to see where the new post is. this is with ie5.0 running on windows nt. i will try with mozilla and let you know what happens.
Are you saying that when the little window says there is new stuff, and you click to open a big window with the main page in it, the main page needs to be refreshed before it indicates new posts? I wonder if that's more of an IE, NT, or intranet thing (your work network might cache pages, forcing you to refresh before it actually goes out to the web and gets the page again from our server.) I'd be curious what happens with other configurations (are all your machines NT at work?)
You're probably right that the monitor window should stay open even after you click through to see something new. The reason it doesn't is that once it finds something new it stops refreshing itself. This way if you left it running for a week while you were away it wouldn't refresh itself forever, only until someone posted something new. I'll try to think of a way around that.
ok. same thing happens with mozilla except that i don't have to refresh the main page - new posts are noted. no biggie, just some feedback.
I appreciate it. There might be a setting in IE preferences somewhere to set whether it gets the page from the web every time, or from it's cache (or maybe some in between setting too, like get it from the web if the cached page is more than a day old, or older than the current session.) If you can find that change it to whatever the strongest 'always load page from the server (not from the cache)' sort of setting you can. Possibly this will slow down your browsing and you won't like it, but I've never found it to be much of a slow down. It can actually speed up browsing in some cases if you have a really fast connection and your disk speed and/or cache system is crappy. And sites are so dynamic, and so often updated, these days it's usually a good idea to load them from the web server every time.
Every time I try to use javascript for something I end up not liking it. What's the point? Are there any good things built with javascript? (Well, O.K., I like how google puts your focus in the search box when the page loads.) Anyway, I redid the activity monitor. Now if you go to /monitor you just get the black page right off. Feel free to minimize the window, or not, however you see fit. (In OS X it would be nice just to put it in the dock where it would still refresh itself and you'd see the tiny version of the page change from black to white if anything new is posted.) Also, it's checking ever 2.5 minutes now. Probably I could have it check every minute and it still wouldn't be that much strain on the server.
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- jim 11-06-2001 3:10 pm
tried this out yesterday and this morning - not exactly sure what happens here, but it seems that when there is a new post, clicking the link in the small monitor window closes that window and opens a new one on the main dmtree page. so the monitor feature is then gone. and i then need to click refresh on the new window main page to see where the new post is. this is with ie5.0 running on windows nt. i will try with mozilla and let you know what happens.
- linda 11-07-2001 5:03 pm
Are you saying that when the little window says there is new stuff, and you click to open a big window with the main page in it, the main page needs to be refreshed before it indicates new posts? I wonder if that's more of an IE, NT, or intranet thing (your work network might cache pages, forcing you to refresh before it actually goes out to the web and gets the page again from our server.) I'd be curious what happens with other configurations (are all your machines NT at work?)
You're probably right that the monitor window should stay open even after you click through to see something new. The reason it doesn't is that once it finds something new it stops refreshing itself. This way if you left it running for a week while you were away it wouldn't refresh itself forever, only until someone posted something new. I'll try to think of a way around that.
- jim 11-07-2001 8:22 pm
ok. same thing happens with mozilla except that i don't have to refresh the main page - new posts are noted. no biggie, just some feedback.
- linda 11-07-2001 8:36 pm
I appreciate it. There might be a setting in IE preferences somewhere to set whether it gets the page from the web every time, or from it's cache (or maybe some in between setting too, like get it from the web if the cached page is more than a day old, or older than the current session.) If you can find that change it to whatever the strongest 'always load page from the server (not from the cache)' sort of setting you can. Possibly this will slow down your browsing and you won't like it, but I've never found it to be much of a slow down. It can actually speed up browsing in some cases if you have a really fast connection and your disk speed and/or cache system is crappy. And sites are so dynamic, and so often updated, these days it's usually a good idea to load them from the web server every time.
- jim 11-07-2001 8:45 pm
Every time I try to use javascript for something I end up not liking it. What's the point? Are there any good things built with javascript? (Well, O.K., I like how google puts your focus in the search box when the page loads.) Anyway, I redid the activity monitor. Now if you go to /monitor you just get the black page right off. Feel free to minimize the window, or not, however you see fit. (In OS X it would be nice just to put it in the dock where it would still refresh itself and you'd see the tiny version of the page change from black to white if anything new is posted.) Also, it's checking ever 2.5 minutes now. Probably I could have it check every minute and it still wouldn't be that much strain on the server.
- jim 11-09-2001 3:21 pm