BizzyBee’s BizzyThoughts

Notes.Net Watchdog - a Quick ‘n Dirty tool

There seems to be a function on Notes.Net that sends you e-mails whenever something was added to your selected posts in the forums. Also, that function doesn’t seem to work. This is annoying, because you have to scan all your posts manually and see if somebody answered yet.

That’s why I made a little tool for myself this weekend that automates the checking. A little warning though: I just created it for myself, so it’s a rough version, I didn’t test in different Notes versions, behind firewalls, against proxies, enemies and terrorists.

But it can be of some use for you too and it won’t destroy your computer. I guess the worst thing that could happen, is that your Notes crashes. Or that it doesn’t work. So give it a go and let me know what you think, if there’s enough interest, I might have some extra ideas to make it better and stronger.

How does it work?

If you look at a Notes.Net post, there seems to be a graphic bullet in front of every response. So by counting the number of occurences of these images, you know how many answers were given to a post. If this number changes, you know somebody posted a new answer.

To count the images, I import the html in Notes using code from the UrlFetcher database from the nsftools website.

How to use?

First download the Notes.Net Watchdog database and unzip to your local Notesdata directory.

In the view you’ll see some buttons, this is what they do:

• New: creates a new url to watch. You just have to copy and paste an url containing a Notes.Net post (can be the parent or one of the responses, it doesn’t matter) and optionally give it a title to recognize later.
• Check All: activates the agent that checks if new responses were added for all url’s. If this is the case, a red flag is shown in the view in front of the changed pages.
• Open: opens the url from the selected document to easily go to the corresponding webpage.
• Special: marks the selected documents with a little flame, just to mark them as important to follow up.
• Reset: removes the red flag (useful f.e. if you run the check for the first time)

Give it a try! I put in some example documents to get you started.

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2 Responses to “Notes.Net Watchdog - a Quick ‘n Dirty tool”

1. Alan Lepofsky says:
   November 9th, 2007 at 3:21 pm

   I love the logo… since I play frisbee and love Notes!

2. martin.vereecken says:
   November 9th, 2007 at 3:27 pm

   Thank you! Glad somebody payed attention to this little detail

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