The projects that I am constantly working on include TheWeddingVendor.com and HeresOurWedding.com. I also have another project which is an application where a sites owners can communicate with his/her visitors in real time. Basically it is a chat app, written in PHP and Javascript, with a twist. If there is a representative logged into the control panel the link will show up on the site. When a user clicks the link it will open a chat window and that person will be placed into a queue and wait for one of the reps. There can be many users and many representatives.

The app is pretty Javascript intensive. There is a lot of AJAX requests and data returned in JSON form. I guess that isn't really AJAX then, is it? AJ? Anyway, it has been fun building it but it is not without it's problems. Of course there are problems with IE. Variations between JScript and Javascript. Damn Microsoft and their proprietary BS!!!

Why do you want to have the script constantly running? How often does your data change. You can schedule a cron job to run the script.

You could technically have a script constantly running by doing something like this:
while(true) {
// do whatever you need to here
sleep(60000); // The number of seconds before we run again
}
but I believe you will run into issues with execution time outs. I think the default time out is 30 seconds but you could change that. I wouldn't suggest doing it that way though because it seems rather inefficient. I think scheduling a cron job would be the best option, for PHP anyway. I am not familiar with Python.

As far as the legal issues are concerned, do you have a contract with the site owner? They are technically the ones responsible for the site and it's actions. You can't sue the car manufacturer because some drunk bastard runs you over. If you question their ethics perhaps you can contact the owners of the sites to be scraped to see if they have exposed any web services or RSS feeds that you could use rather than scraping. If they freak out then you know there is something wrong but that may end up costing you the job!

There’s no reason why PHP and a cron job couldn’t handle scraping content from a site. The problem you may run into would be if the site doesn’t have well-formed xhtml. That would make using SimpleXML and/or the DOM* classes somewhat difficult (but not impossible). Worse comes to worse, you could always use regular expressions…

Still, make sure it’s cool with the site owner that you grab the content. Like Jason said, maybe they have an feed or web service you could leverage instead.

Mike G.

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