Wanna know when someone has commented on your post? | Hacker News Reader

Wanna know when someone has commented on your post?

11 pointstcarnell6 comments

(Blantant product plug ahead :-)

I recently posted a question on Hacker News about receiving online payments in the UK - I got a lot of really great answers - thanks everyone.

Because these answers are important to me, I didn't want to miss any valuable comments. Very simply, I created a Femtoo tracker pointing to this URL:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1074860

that monitors the small text "33 comments" text below the post title. Everytime a new comment was posted, I received an Instant Message telling me how many comments there are.

I think this may be really useful to other Hacker News readers... so please check out 'Femtoo.com' :-)

If you don't want to register - fine, you can still receive notifications of trackers that other people have 'published':

http://www.femtoo.com/index.php?action=TrackerLibraryLoad

thanks for you time.

Sounds like an excellent way to get your server banned. After all, if it does that 'the instant' it happens then it has to periodically poll the server.

Since HN is already creaking at the seams I'm really not happy with this kind of bot based service.

That's not what he said, he said the notification was by "Instant Message", not that the notification was "instant".

Obviously it have to poll the page, but in principle that can be polite, ideally it'll have a decay feature where if it hasn't been updated in a while the checks will by steps decay to, say, once a day, then once a week, then once a month, and give up after, say, 5 years.

But it would have to be polling to get a response in a way that is quicker than you could get by visiting HN a couple of times.

So, the question then becomes how frequently does it poll?

at the momment, every 30 minutes.

Yes, exactly. Femtoo uses the cQuery.com Content Selection Engine, which itself has some fancy content caching mechanisms to reduce the amount of actual 'polling'

Actually, the purpose of Femtoo is to inform people of new website content so they return to the site to read it - thus, it is in the site owners best interests to allow Femtoo to poll it.

Femtoo will ultimately drive more traffic to your site.

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