Email Notification Service
As any HTML author knows, information is only useful if it is
valid. Unfortunately, a lot of information has an inherent
expiration date. Things like meeting schedules, announcements
of upcoming events, and pages with those annoying yellow
'NEW' images by certain links.
BlackSeek Search Engine (ht://Dig) can be told to remind you about an HTML page
sometime in the future. The reminder/notification will come
by email and will contain the URL to the page plus some other
information.
Use
ht://Dig detects special use of the <META> tag in HTML
documents. The <META> tags should go between
<HEAD> and </HEAD> of an HTML document.
Example:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META NAME="htdig-email"
CONTENT="pat.user@nowhere.net">
<META NAME="htdig-email-subject" CONTENT="Reminder to
update a page">
<META NAME="htdig-notification-date"
CONTENT="8/28/1995">
<TITLE>Someone's homepage.</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Body of document
</BODY>
</HTML>
After 8/28/1995 pat.user@nowhere.net will get a mail message
which will look something like this:
From: ht://Dig email notification service
Subject: WWW notification: Reminder to
update a page
To: pat.user@nowhere.net
The following page was tagged to notify you after 8/28/1995.
URL: http://www.sdsu.edu/~turtle/index.html
Date: 8/28/1995
Subject: Reminder to update a page
Attributes
The special ht://Dig <META> tag attributes related to
notification are:
-
NAME="htdig-email" CONTENT="email address [, email
address] ..."
-
NAME="htdig-notification-date" CONTENT="earliest
notification date"
-
NAME="htdig-email-subject" CONTENT="notification message
subject"
Descriptions of the values for the attributes:
-
htdig-email
-
This is the email address the notification message should
be sent to. Multiple email addresses can be given by
separating them by commas. If no email address is given, no
notification will be sent.
-
htdig-notification-date
-
This is the date on or after which the notification should
be sent. The format is simply month / day / year,
or if the iso_8601
attribute is set, year - month - day.
Make sure that the year has the century with it as well.
This means that you should use 1995 instead of
95.
The format of dates is actually a little more flexible than
this. Any punctuation or white space can be used as separators,
and if the year, month and date do not appear as expected in the
order listed above, the notification service will try to make
sense of the order used, if the date can be resolved unambiguously
in another order. Using four-digit years avoids ambiguity between
the year and the month or day. The format year - month -
day is accepted without ambiguity when a four-digit year is
used, whether the iso_8601 attribute is set or not. When the
year is given after the month and day, the format is either
day - month - year, if iso_8601 is true and the year
has four digits, or month - day - year otherwise.
If no date is given, no notification will be sent. If a date is
given but is malformed, a notification of this error will be sent.
For correct dates, a notification will be sent every time the
system runs the notification service, on or after the date given.
To end the notifications, you must update or remove the
notification date in the document.
-
htdig-email-subject
-
This specifies the subject the notification message. This
is an optional attribute. Note that if you want to put
spaces in the subject, you have to put
double quotes (") around it.
There are a couple of other META attributes which are
recognized. These can be found in the more general
ht://Dig META tag documentation.
Disclaimer
This service is a free service for all HTML maintainers whose
documents are covered by the ht://Dig search system. If any
of the attributes are improperly formatted, no notifications
will be mailed. Email notification may not always occur on
the date that you specified. We can only guarantee a
notification of at most once a week.
Andrew Scherpbier <andrew@contigo.com>
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