Use GeekTool to view the online list of a PHPBB forum
Jan 11, '05 09:02:00AM
Contributed by: t3hl33t
Here's a GeekTool widget that shows you who's online on your favourite forum sites (as long as they use phpBB). The commandline to enter into GeekTool is:
/sw/bin/lynx -dump websitepath | grep 2005
Where websitepath is the URL of the forum, followed by /viewonline.php. For example, the 68k Macintosh Liberation Army forums are located at http://www.68kmla.net, which makes the websitepath is http://www.68kmla.net/viewonline.php. For another example, PHPBB's own forums are at http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/, so the websitepath is http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewonline.php.
Problems/Difficulties and how they can be overcome:
- You need lynx. Get Fink and use that to install lynx.
- If you are reading this in 2006 or later, replace 2005 in the grep command with the current year.
- This only works with PHPBB forums. It can probably be adapted to work with other forums, though.
- Refreshing at high rates can be hard on the webhost. I set mine to go once every two minutes.
- For every person doing this, there will always be one guest "viewing who is online."
[robg adds: For vBulletin forums such as forums.macosxhints.com, it seems the websitepath would be http://forums.macosxhints.com/online.php?. However, vBulletin has a very lengthy user list display, so I'm not sure how useful this might be...]
Comments (4)
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050107102556152