how hard would it be to add the option that if the dmtree.com page was open it would automatically refresh when there was new content on a page?
Basically impossible. There is no way for the server to send any messages to the client machines (your machine) unless your machine asks for something. This is because there is no server software on your computer listening for incoming signals. Instead there is web browsing software that listens for incoming data, but it only listens in response to specific queries it has made - it's not listening all the time.
What could be done (and this is how the old watcher page used to work,) is to make a web page so that your browser automatically reloads it at a specific interval (like every 5 seconds or something.) In other words, you can't push unrequested stuff from the server to the browser, but you can have the browser just constantly poll (anything new yet? anything new yet? anything new yet?) so that when there is something new it will show up.
But that's not really what you are looking for. And it puts a big load on the server to have everyone polling all the time.
If your email is retrieved automatically you might try signing up for email notification of changes (in /subscription for each page.) This way you at least know when to bother refreshing.
thats unfortunate. thanks for the input.
I get update alerts through my pop client (email) to a couple of pages to which I subscribe.
Also, people might want to think about experimenting with RSS readers. I'll post something about this on my page after I get some coffee in me.
Time passes and things change. Dave's original suggestion here is now entirely doable using the new buzzword web technology AJAX. This is a collection of technologies supported by new browsers that let the web application (something like dmtree) receive queries from and update just parts of a web page without refreshing the whole page.
AJAX is a broad name for the tricks behind gmail and google maps and web pages like that which seem a little more like desktop applications. For example, you can just click and drag in google maps to move the map and the whole page doesn't get reloaded from the server. Similarly, we could use this technology to have the [x new posts] and [x new comments] counters update without having to reload the front page.
The tradeoff is a higher load on the server and a small bandwidth hit. Still I imagine this is something we will see here. Not at the very top of the list, but I just remembered this post so I thought I'd comment again now that the tech has changed.
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- dave 12-10-2003 12:20 am
Basically impossible. There is no way for the server to send any messages to the client machines (your machine) unless your machine asks for something. This is because there is no server software on your computer listening for incoming signals. Instead there is web browsing software that listens for incoming data, but it only listens in response to specific queries it has made - it's not listening all the time.
What could be done (and this is how the old watcher page used to work,) is to make a web page so that your browser automatically reloads it at a specific interval (like every 5 seconds or something.) In other words, you can't push unrequested stuff from the server to the browser, but you can have the browser just constantly poll (anything new yet? anything new yet? anything new yet?) so that when there is something new it will show up.
But that's not really what you are looking for. And it puts a big load on the server to have everyone polling all the time.
If your email is retrieved automatically you might try signing up for email notification of changes (in /subscription for each page.) This way you at least know when to bother refreshing.
- jim 12-12-2003 4:30 pm [add a comment]
thats unfortunate. thanks for the input.
- dave 12-12-2003 5:14 pm [add a comment]
I get update alerts through my pop client (email) to a couple of pages to which I subscribe.
- mark 12-13-2003 9:00 am [add a comment]
Also, people might want to think about experimenting with RSS readers. I'll post something about this on my page after I get some coffee in me.
- jim 12-13-2003 4:49 pm [add a comment]
Time passes and things change. Dave's original suggestion here is now entirely doable using the new buzzword web technology AJAX. This is a collection of technologies supported by new browsers that let the web application (something like dmtree) receive queries from and update just parts of a web page without refreshing the whole page.
AJAX is a broad name for the tricks behind gmail and google maps and web pages like that which seem a little more like desktop applications. For example, you can just click and drag in google maps to move the map and the whole page doesn't get reloaded from the server. Similarly, we could use this technology to have the [x new posts] and [x new comments] counters update without having to reload the front page.
The tradeoff is a higher load on the server and a small bandwidth hit. Still I imagine this is something we will see here. Not at the very top of the list, but I just remembered this post so I thought I'd comment again now that the tech has changed.
- jim 11-20-2005 1:40 am [add a comment]