phantom11's blog

Codeforces Favourite Blog Update Notifier
By phantom11, 10 years ago, In English

There are so many blogs coming up on codeforces everyday and we sometimes loose the blog which we are following which have got new comments. One of my friends, xorfire wanted something like this in his recent blog yesterday, in which I have also commented my idea, and so I decided to write a script to automate the procedure. Firstly thanks to xorfire for coming up with this idea.

You can download the zipped folder from here. Extract it to some folder name of your choice. Inside it you will find many files which are actually dependencies, but you need to open just notification.exe file. I will describe the the functionality now.

  • Username / Password fields -> Update them once in the beginning or whenever you want to change your username password. You do not need to write it every time.

  • Add Favorite Blog -> Add the complete URL of the blog you want to follow. Example -> "http://codeforces.net/blog/entry/12727" (quotes for clarity). You can add as many as you want one by one.

  • Manage stored blogs -> If you want to delete some blogs, click this button and it will show your complete list in a new window. There will be delete option beneath every URL. You can delete any number of them, and then close the popped up window.

  • Run Notifier -> This is the main thing. It will search all your favorite blogs and notify you for those which have new comments. It takes around 10 second for each blog (depends on your internet) . So run it and forget it for a minute (I assume you will not have more than 6-7 fav blogs, otherwise it will take more time). A new window will open where you will find the blogs which have new comments. These are click-able links and on clicking will redirect you to the concerned blogs.

I have made this in 8-9 hours and have given absolutely no time to beautify it. Also it was my first time to use GUI in python. So you may find it ugly, but it works well and that is what is important. Also I have made it for personal use of everyone. So don't try to be smart and do unnecessary things to hack it like writing some blogs which do not exist at all (It might fail & I don't mind it). I made it for the welfare and personal use of the community and also in quick time, so use it in the right spirit. There are no security measures , (your username and password are stored in a file in the same directory) , so do not use it in public systems. I have tested in on Windows 7 and Windows XP and it works fine on both.

I hope you all will like it!!!

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10 years ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +3 Vote: I do not like it

Some advices:

  1. Given username and password you could just parse from /favourite/blogEntries the user's favorite blogs (instead of forcing the user to insert the URLs manually).
  2. Have you considered making this a Chromium (or FF) extension rather than an exe? You could use desktop notifications which would be nice. Also check them out here.
  3. Have you considered making this open source?
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    10 years ago, # ^ |
    ← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

    Thank you for the suggestions :)

    1. Yes that is right. I will try and make the changes.
    2. No, as I had said, I made this very quickly in one go. And I have no experience of making extensions in any browser, so that would have taken a lot of time. Also making extensions would be browser specific. So what if I use FF and you use Chrome. That would increase the work load.
    3. Yes, certainly. I will add the code to github so that people can make necessary changes themselves. I will update the link here in a while.

    EDIT — And here is the link to git repo. You can see the code there.

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