I use JP Software’s 4NT, a wonderful and much-improved command shell (it replaces Windows’ CMD.EXE). JP Software released a major version of it about six or seven months ago, and there have been about a dozen minor updates since. Unfortunately, they don’t have any way to automatically check when these updates come out… you have to monitor their support newsgroup and watch for announcements of update releases, or check their download page on a regular basis. As a software developer, this inefficiency drove me nuts.

Last night, I decided to do something about it. What I really wanted was an RSS feed that would let me know when a new version was available, but as JP Software has no interest in providing one, I went looking for some way to create one of my own. There are several sites that will create RSS feeds of any web page, but I didn’t want any of those because I didn’t know how reliable they were. Given an option, I wanted something under my control that would create the RSS feed, either on my system or (if that wasn’t possible) on my website.

I found only one thing that would do it, a (very) simple PHP script that used the CURL extension that created an RSS 0.92 feed for a single page. Unfortunately it didn’t work: Thunderbird wouldn’t recognize when it reported a changed page. But by examining it, digging into the RSS specs and an online PHP manual, and some experimentation, I managed to write a similar script (producing an RSS 2.0 feed) that did work, and that could be used for any web page! 😀

It’s my first foray into PHP coding (I’m mostly a C/C++ guy), and I’m ridiculously proud of it. I may post it here later, but if anyone wants a copy before that, they can contact me for it via the comments section below.