Neil's News

SlashProxy

5 June 2003

One year ago I announced the availability of two Slashdot monitors. CowboyNeal was supportive, added a link to my monitors from the Slashdot code page and they quickly became the most heavily trafficked pages on my site. Since my server was relaying the info to over a hundred others, CowboyNeal didn't have a problem with me fetching the Slashdot RDF every 10 minutes (the requested refresh time for individuals is once every 30 minutes).

Then last month my IP address was banned without warning. No more updates. My emails requesting the ban be lifted were redirected to /dev/null. So I've side-stepped the ban; literally. I've written a trivial proxy and dropped it on a few machines around the net that I have access to. The central monitor running on this server uses load-balancing to make sure that each proxy is never used to fetch the RDF more than once an hour.

This is where I need help. If you have access to a quasi-reliable server and wouldn't mind me loading one web page an hour from it, please install the above proxy (it's a trivial two-line Perl script) and let me know the URL. The more of these proxies I have access to, the more up to date I can keep the Slashdot monitors. Thanks!

Update: Lars Dieckow pointed out that the Slashdot monitor could also be made available as an Opera panel. This has been done.

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