Opera's UNIX dev on how he uses wget and grep to read blog comments

Ruario maintains the Opera AUR entry for Arch Linux also, and does very good job of it so earns credit:<p><a href="http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=10333" rel="nofollow">http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=10333</a><p><a href="http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=33276" rel="nofollow">http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=33276</a>

Funny to see an Opera guy suggesting a way to browse the web without using Opera :) He even says it is easier to read all the comments that way (via text using curl / wget/ grep) instead of using their browser (not that I don't agree with him).

Great approach, but some work could have been saved (and robustness added) using the W3C’s HTML-XML-utils. For example, there’s hxselect, which filters HTML/XML against a CSS selector, and hxpipe, which breaks XML input into a more grep/awk-friendly format. I’ve used these tools myself on multiple occasions, they’ve saved me a huge amount of time.

He's not alone. :-) Richard Stallman goes a step further as his laptop isn't directly connected to the internet.<p><pre><code> Quote: For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time. </code></pre> Source: <a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/" rel="nofollow">http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/</a>

Talk about wrong tools for the job. A far simpler to write, and more robust solution could be had many other way, simple_html in php for example, or javascript, any DOM parser will be more robust and easier to follow than all those sed/grep calls.

Take away: including permalinks for included bits of pages (such as comments) can be useful when they are crawled. Encouraging serendipity.