Anyone know where I might find something like this, or how I might cobble together two apps that would give me this utility?
Peter
The Need:
Every day I visit major newspaper, scientific journal and focused news-gathering sites, looking for headlines on stories that relate to the science and business of biology and genomics. Most of the sites have required me to register and to accept a cookie. Some have required me to use a password that is saved. I go only to sites that show news headlines and short summaries, with a clickable link to each full-length item. A typical day will have me open and read 30-50 such links in real time. I also later visit specialist Yahoo! message boards, scan their contents, and in any day typically find 3-5 messages I would like to capture and store cumulatively with little effort in folders already designated on my PC, without fear of overwriting their earlier contents.
The Problem:
Currently available usenet and web page grabbers are indiscriminate. They download all they find at all levels on a tree, down to the designated level. The user cannot be selective within a level, cannot tell the grabber to selectively ignore some or all of the levels higher on the tree, and cannot tell the grabber to ignore other branches on the same tree.
My dream utility would work as follows:
1) I would go to a msg. board or newspaper site (The New York Times is a good example http://www.nytimes.com/)
2) I would scan down the lists of offered links on msg. threads or news items, right clicking on each item of interest – and instead of opening, each link would be accumulated on a clipboard by the utility, annotated with a source tag.
3) When I’ve been to all the boards and newspapers I visit every day, the utility would then let me review the full list of the links I’ve ticked for opening, so that I can remove some of them if the count for the day is getting too high or stories have been duplicated on different sites.
4) The utility would then use Task Scheduler to open IE 5 for me while at a meeting or after hours, automatically open each link in turn, grab the text contents and park them for me in a daily file, to be read later. I rarely want embedded pictures or graphics, but a yes/no choice for them against each target would be really neat. I would also like the utility to be compatible with the use of WebWasher, to avoid downloading advertisements and pop-ups.
