Re: [Bug-wget] Planning update to wget. Should I upstream it?

[Richard Thomas]

On 8/23/2018 2:56 AM, Tim Rühsen wrote:

> Feedback into the project is what it lives on :-)
> Your goal sounds interesting, what do you need it for ?
Well, it's fairly trivial and there might be a better way but...

What I am looking to do is retrieve and store pages from ebay. Several 
times a month, I buy electronic components and modules from ebay. Often, 
the specs and instruction for these items are on the page itself. Also, 
the items when they arrive are often labelled cryptically and if I 
haven't been diligent with sorting them, often a trip to the page is the 
best way to identify what exactly I have found in one of my boxes of 
wonders.

Now, ebay makes it hard to get to these pages after a few months (though 
they are still there) and they eventually become inaccessible completely 
after a number of years. So what I have been doing is towards the end of 
the year, grabbing all the item numbers from pages which are about to 
expire and pushing them through wget. Thus I get a mirrored version of 
all my purchased items. Unfortunately, this process is far from perfect. 
Some items still disappear and sometimes, it seems that the vendor has 
repurposed the item number and a different item is on the page.

So my goal is to have procmail trigger a process when I receive an order 
confirmation from ebay, go and retrieve the relevant page then send it 
as an email so that I have a permanent record of the complete info of 
that page from close to the time that I placed the order.

I imagine that it might be useful for other purposes too. And I recall 
hearing that Stalman would read webpages by emailing them to himself. 
Presumably that was text-only though.

Rich