Seeing as it's Friday, time for some of that science shenanigans.
Earlier in the week, the McCain campaign announced that it had someone develop a little application that could monitor a website and show you the changes that had been made. And in doing so, were trying to show Obama for a flip-flopper because of these changes.
The politicos' mutual stalking has reached unprecedented new levels this year: At least one side has started to spider the other's campaign website to track that campaign pages' precise word changes up to an hourly basis.
Sorry if you missed it as a news item: all the geeks were "oh wow" about it on Wednesday, but by Thursday they were all waiting for 'The Dark Knight' to open and they wanted to be first in line.
There's just one problem for McCain with this.
Balls.
More, below the fold.
We know that Bush already decided to quit golf and had stuck to that decision said he had quit golf because he doesn't "want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf."
Quite. The lack of taste.
Erm, never mind. On with the website topic. McCain's people decided that it's OK for the rest of us to blast out of a sand trap in 100 degree heat, so they released their McCain Golf Pack for Father's Day. And people could comment on the product, as they could with any of the products for sale.
And this is what people wrote!
(The actual image is three pages or so long, and it looks something like this...
...so click on the link above to read the comments without squinting.)
Why didn't I just link to the page in question, you may ask? Well, because the McCain campaign altered their website so the comments weren't there any more.
Changing the contents of a website happens all the time. Especially on the other side of the aisle. One example is when, as Huffington Post reported at the time, Vicki Iseman's bio was pulled from the web site of her firm (Alcade and Faye) in late February because of the breaking story concerning McCain and lobbyists. Luckily, it has been web archived here at the same web address.
So I'm putting out the call to all web-savvy people out there. I don't have the technical know-how to write a program that will check a website every hour and report back with all changes and iterations. Looking around online, I understand it's a common enough application called a Web Spider, and one website says the lines of code would function like this...
Get the user's input: the starting URL and the desired
file type. Add the URL to the currently empty list of
URLs to search. While the list of URLs to search is
not empty,
{
Get the first URL in the list.
Move the URL to the list of URLs already searched.
Check the URL to make sure its protocol is HTTP
(if not, break out of the loop, back to "While").
See whether there's a robots.txt file at this site
that includes a "Disallow" statement.
(If so, break out of the loop, back to "While".)
Try to "open" the URL (that is, retrieve
that document From the Web).
If it's not an HTML file, break out of the loop,
back to "While."
Step through the HTML file. While the HTML text
contains another link,
{
Validate the link's URL and make sure robots are
allowed (just as in the outer loop).
If it's an HTML file,
If the URL isn't present in either the to-search
list or the already-searched list, add it to
the to-search list.
Else if it's the type of the file the user
requested,
Add it to the list of files found.
}
}
How about we return the favor?