JDPFu.com 2025

Lifehacker is a site that many of us watch daily for tips. If you join the community, you may find that the LH site can sometimes become … er … slow. The cause of this can be many things, but personally, I think they’ve gone overboard with all the javascript.

Someone mentioned they had written a real-time notification script to tell him about relies to his posts and he asked others what they would like of the script. I started thinking and determined it would be a fairly trivial script to do what I wanted – email a list of replies in simple HTML.

As with all scripts, they are never really done and prone to tweaks for the next year. I think the next tweak will be to try the feed.xml that LH provides. Perhaps it will be smaller, faster and easier to parse?

So I attempted to attach the script to this article using tools build into the blogging system. Both have failed.

1. Upload – so RSS feed readers see an attachment link – no joy
2. Excerpt – I’ve used this in previous versions of the blog successfully. No more. The issue is probably due to my theme.

Anyway, here’s the code

#!/usr/bin/perl


	
#####################################################
	
Display Lifehacker Profile data
	
Recent Replies (first pg only)
	
Followers
	
Friends

#
	
Known Linux Dependencies:
	
- perl and LWP and Getopt modules
	
- sudo cpan -i LWP::Simple

#
	
Installation
	
1) Change the Your-LH-Profile-name-Here below to yours
	
2) chmod +x lh_profile_monitor.cgi
	
3a) Either run as is   $0 > output.html
	
Or
	
3b) Setup as a CGI on your web server
	
Or
	
3c) Setup as a crontab entry which will automatically email the results

#
	
$Id: lh_profile_monitor.cgi,v 1.5 2009/12/16 14:32:55 jdfsdp Exp jdfsdp $

#
	
#####################################################

use strict;

use LWP::Simple;

use Getopt::Long;


	
#####################################################

sub life_hacker_data();


	
#####################################################

my $profile_name=“Your-LH-Profile-name-Here”;

my $doHelp = 0;

my $download = 1;

my $profile_page=“http://lifehacker.com/people/$profile_name/”;
	
my $profile_page=“http://lifehacker.com/people/$profile_name/feed.xml”;

my $date=`date +%r`;

my $ret=GetOptions (“help|?” => \$doHelp, 

                    “profile=s” => \$profile_name,

                    “download=i” => \$download);

my $html_header = “Content-type: text/html\n\n 


”refresh\" CONTENT=\“600\”>

 
  ";

my $html_footer = “”;


	
########################################################

sub Usage()

{

   print “\nUsage: 

       $0 [-download 0/1] -profile LifeHacker_Profile\n”;

  exit 1;

}


	
#####################################################
	
main()
	
The output is a filtered html file to stdout

#
	
Grab the new page

Usage() if ( $doHelp );


	
`/usr/local/bin/curl $profile_page > $profile_tmp_file` if ($download);

my $content = get( $profile_page ) if ($download);

my @lh_content = split(/\n/, $content);

print “$html_header\n”;

print “
List of Recent Replied to Messages


Pulled from ”$profile_page\“>$profile_page at $date

”;

my $ret=life_hacker_data();

print “$ret\n”;

print “\n$html_footer\n\n”;


	
#####################################################

sub life_hacker_data()

{
	
Display the total count of
	

		
Friends
		
Followers
		
Msgs with replies

   my $ret="";

   foreach (@lh_content){

     if (m#/friends/$profile_name|/followers/$profile_name|replied# ){

        $ret .= $_;

     }

   }

   $ret =~ s#