i know how to, but i do not really understand what you want. do you want me to run a robot on my server that sends emails to you as auctions are listed?

is this out of the goodness of my heart? i guess if you paid server fees i could do it. cause then i could use the same server to spread the good word. so half of your money would be donated to the blankflag public awareness campaign.

on the subject, does anybody know good web hosting? maybe vps?

i see there are hostgator, bluehost, dreamhost, 1&1

now they all seem to offer more storage and bandwidth than i need, so i do not care too much about that.

the ram is maybe important. but what i really care about is the speed.

what is going on with these webhosts? they tell me all these statistics on what i get, but absolutely nothing on the speed.

i know that it is variable, but at least show me an average or something or a minimum transfer speed or a minimum response time. a friend of mine used 1&1 years and years ago and his page would take a minute to load or something, it was pathetic.

oh i stand corrected, 1&1 does seem to say how fast it is "100 Mbit for quick Internet access" for the cheapest vps.

so... ironic, the massively slow one years ago is the only one that is guaranteeing me decent speed. ... maybe because it was slow and people were complaining they decided to do something about it...

Blankflag - do I need a server? If I leave my laptop on between 9am and 6pm and use a script to keep refreshing the page could I run everything I need to send me alert emails from my Laptop?

yeah... i guess.

depends on the website, you may need to fake that you are a browser. before my month-long ban/silence whatever i started an alternative media website that crawled rss feeds and stole the content. and some websites noticed the connection was not coming from a web browser or mail client and blocked it. retarded, but it happens.

so... yeah, maybe find web crawling code that already has that web browser impersonation stuff written... and yeah, maybe go with that.... who knows. too much work for me to think about.

but maybe this website will accept any connection even if it does not look like a web browser, in which case the code will probably be a bit simpler.

i do not think it is a difficult problem. just time consuming.

i am sure you can do it all with java... we used to use that obsolete language at school. and we did things like that.

you have a function called "sleep". or maybe another thing called events. that is the thing with this crappy language, there are a hundred ways of doing the same thing.

but anyway you sleep it, or event it, or whatever, so every minute the crawling function gets called. then in that crawling function you just do a file copy from the server to your computer. then on your computer you might want to use some html parsing library to check the listings....

of course if this auction website changes its layout you might have to rewrite some of your code....

check if this website has an rss feed of auctions. that might be easier to do rather than trying to parse html.

then when you have gotten a list of items from the page/pages, you have to compare them and see if there is a new one not in your list of items.

if so, then send an email.

you can see it is actually kind of complicated. but doable....... anyway good luck with that

if you want me to write all the code then send it to you, i am not too interested. i actually used to do that, sometimes for friends. then this dick i knew kept telling me to write all this code to do all this stuff. and every single thing i sent him he was unhappy with. i ended up spending tens of hours on this project. and more than half the time was just reading and writing emails trying to figure out what he wanted. and in the end i just had enough.

i worked all that time for nothing, out of the goodness of my heart, and he was just kind of a dick in the end. since then i am not really too interested in doing it. but if you know some kids wanting to go into computer science they might be willing to do some free coding for you since the economy has been destroyed and they likely have no hope of ever getting a job.

you know what? actually if the site has rss then i have a better solution for you.

presumably you want an email alert to go to some smartphone telling you that there is a new listing. well you can probably get a smartphone rss reader app that gives you an alert when new rss content is available.

so just download the app and point it to the rss link.

hopefully they support rss. i know ebay used to. maybe still does.

Thanks blankflag - I've sent you an IM