A couple years back, I made a yahoo widget that would check JK Rowling’s official site for updates. I never really let it out of beta and eventually abandoned it out of lack of motivation. To my knowledge, it is not widely used, I would be surprised if one person knew about it! But anyway, i decided I might as well let out the source code for the thing in case anyone wants to improve on it! Anywho, all the code (including old versions) can be found at:

http://jimcortez.com/code/JKRCOMwidget/

I am going to say this now, this was written a long time ago and has only a slight bearing on what I am capable of now. With that out of the way, I can say I do not remember very much if at all of what I wrote. I know there is a javascript file in there that, to my spotty memory, is actually pretty well documented. From what I do remember, it uses (probably outdated and slow) XML parsing to parse out the cfm files generated by the site. It uses flat cache files to decided if a site is new or not. For all I know, they (being lightmaker) have changed the way the site functions and the code won’t actually work.

Feel free to use the code however you please, I am not going to go through the trouble of attaching a license to it. If you do happen to start using it, I would be interested in an email!

Have fun!

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