MacRumors Dashboard gadget

[themadchemist]

Arn could probably answer this question best, but this goes to anyone.

So I had the idea of designing a MacRumors dashboard gadget that would grab the "Recent Comments" from the main page every 30 minutes or so...However, I don't know how the recent comments are generated (or even if that generation is accessible to anything outside the domain) and I was wondering if there's an easy way to capture that generation and divert it toward another page.

Thanks in advance!

[Rower_CPU]

With Perl or PHP or another server-side technology you can pull down a page and strip out content with some pattern matching and then serve the content back for a widget...but as far as anything "portable", I'm not sure.

Any javascript experts willing to weigh in on whether js could do it?

[jcook793]

These forums use vBulletin, so you might be able to grab the recent posts as an RSS feed:
http://forums.macrumors.com/external.php?type=rss

I haven't done this before, but I googled around on it out of boredom. Another interesting feed is this:
http://forums.macrumors.com/external.php?type=js

But you should ask Arn to make sure it's OK.

[ravenvii]

A widget that mimics the site (the news on one side, and recent posts on the other, flippable) would be sweet!

[Knox]

This might be of use

http://developer.apple.com/internet/webcontent/xmlhttpreq.html