Filed under: Tips and tricks, Odds and ends, Internet Tools
Auto refresh any web page
Last night when the Apple store went down, I got tired of hitting refresh in Safari every few minutes while waiting for it to come back up, and went searching for something that would do the job for free.Now, this is not for coders who will laugh hysterically at my incompetence, but for those of you that are either lazy or don't program at all. I fit both categories.
Back in 2005 someone going by the moniker of Biovizier posted the solution on Macosxhints.com. It's a little html snippet that will refresh any web page as frequently as you'd like, and its easily customizable for any page at all.
Here it is:
<html>
<head>
<**** **********="refresh" content="60">
</head>
<body>
<FRAMESET>
<FRAME src="http://www.tuaw.com">
</FRAMESET>
</body>
</html>
Copy this into TextEdit and save it with an .html extension. Then just double click it.
You can change the refresh time from 60 to the amount of seconds you want to wait before the page refreshes, and you can change the URL to anything you want. I was using: http://apple.com/store and having it refresh every 20 seconds which must make me a certifiable fanatic.
Since I saw this I've found a ton of uses for it, like refreshing eBay auctions in the last few minutes, or just leaving it set for TUAW to see new stories coming up when I'm doing something else. At present I have four or five of these snippets in a folder on my desktop for different purposes.
Give it a try and see if you don't find a handful of uses for it.
Okay, you coders can stop laughing now.
Note: TJ Luoma just let me know that this tip won't work with Twitter which intentionally blocks this sort of thing.
Thanks to macosxhints.com and Biovizier wherever you are.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Robert said 5:44PM on 9-30-2009
you know, if you were using firefox there is an addon called reload every, with customizable refresh times.
Reply
Joshua Meadows said 5:59PM on 9-30-2009
I think that this stuff really needs a disclaimer of "please be considerate." Refreshing a billion times uses up server CPU and bandwidth (both of which are paid for by the person who owns the site) and I just know people are rushing out to set stuff up now to ping their favorite sites every second now.
Erick said 8:19PM on 9-30-2009
@Joshua Meadows
Not if you are a competent admin and have all the appropriate caching and gzip stuff going on.
ack154 said 5:44PM on 9-30-2009
The ReloadEvery Firefox extension if fantastic for this sort of thing.
Wonderful for Woot!Offs.
Reply
robert said 4:36PM on 10-01-2009
My favorite tool for Wootoffs! :-) Also use it on Ebay.
xekc said 5:49PM on 9-30-2009
Just hit the right click and set the "Reload every..." to whatever you like. In Opera browser. And its there for ages.
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Pradador said 5:57PM on 9-30-2009
Lol don't use this to auto-refresh eBay. You'll get outbid and in the time it takes you to click and make a new bid, the page will auto refresh and it will make you lose the bidding. Not that this has happened to me...
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Dirk Sierd de Vries said 6:03PM on 9-30-2009
I've been using http://www.pagereboot.com/ for a while now. Works great! Includes a bookmarklet for easy access
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Arild said 6:10PM on 9-30-2009
If all you care about is Apple Store, check out this nice script: http://pastie.org/637350
Start the script, and it will check Apple Store to see if its back online (and then launch a browser with the page).
I got this script somewhere on the net...
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Perrin said 6:18PM on 9-30-2009
Firefox extension check4change goes one further in that it alerts you when the page you are refreshing changes.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3028
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elasticthreads said 6:25PM on 9-30-2009
I was going to recommend pagereboot as well. The javascript bookmarklet seems like a much better way to do it...
On the future-leaning side: Has/Will TUAW implemented rssCloud/pubsubhubub? Seems like real-time feeds are the real elegant solution here... (check out lazyfeed.com for a real-time aggregator)
Reply
CaptSaltyJack said 6:32PM on 9-30-2009
HUH?
Why are there asterisks there? That's supposed to be:
Also, it's invalid HTML to put a within a . Get rid of the tags.
Reply
CaptSaltyJack said 6:33PM on 9-30-2009
Ahem, let me rephrase that. replace square brackets [ ] with angle brackets since this blog won't let me post them.
HUH?
[**** **********="refresh" content="60"]
Why are there asterisks there? That's supposed to be:
[meta http-equiv="refresh" content="60"]
Also, it's invalid HTML to put a [frameset] within a [body]. Get rid of the [body] tags.
David Winograd said 6:40PM on 9-30-2009
Hey, I told you I don't code, but I've been waiting for your type to come around ;-).
All I can tell you is that it works.
And that's enough for me.
CaptSaltyJack said 7:02PM on 9-30-2009
David. Dude. Are you telling me **** **********="refresh" content="60" works? Because **** is not a valid HTML tag, ever, in any reality. And I've got a ton of experience as a web guy.
Sorry man, I followed your steps exactly and all I get when I open the html page up is a blank page that shows the [**** **********="refresh" content="60"]. Why? Because it's completely invalid.
Use the code I listed above instead. And get rid of the BODY tags, too. THEN it works perfectly.
Reply
CaptSaltyJack said 7:03PM on 9-30-2009
And remember to replace the square brackets [ ] in my posts with angle brackets.
< >
CaptSaltyJack said 7:04PM on 9-30-2009
Working code: (paste this into an HTML file)
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5">
</head>
<FRAMESET>
<FRAME src="http://www.tuaw.com">;
</FRAMESET>
</html>
bkenney said 9:22AM on 10-01-2009
The *** stuff seems to work in safari but not firefox.
BigDog said 7:30PM on 9-30-2009
OR you could get the firefox refresh addon and set it to any second you want!
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Jordan said 8:26PM on 9-30-2009
I hacked together a "revised" bookmarklet based on the one provided by the folks at pagereboot.com.
Create a new bookmark in Safari with the following address:
javascript:location.href%20=%20'http://www.pagereboot.com?url='%20+%20location.href+'&refresh=30';
Clicking the bookmarklet will automatically begin auto-refreshing the current page every 30 seconds.
Reply