Subscribe to the RSS feedFree Download: Consolidated Browser
In a recent post I mentioned RSS and the free newsletter as alternatives to manually checking to see if this site has been updated. Today, I’d like to offer you something I’ve been using for a while to monitor sites that don’t have RSS feeds. I call it the Consolidated Browser.
The Consolidated Browser is nothing more than an HTML page that you store on your computer and load in your browser. You configure it to point to your sites of interest. All it does is display those sites in a stack of iframes in your browser window. There are quicklinks to each site’s iframe and the entire collection refreshes at a configurable interval. All you need to do is slide the outer scrollbar to see if anything has changed on the sites.
Configuration is easy. Edit the file and change the following section to point to your favorite sites:
// MODIFY THIS
sites[0] = “monduke.com”;
sites[1] = “www.jroller.com/page/whoami”;
sites[2] = “www.cnn.com”;
// MODIFY THIS
You can have as many sites as you wish. Simply increase the index number by one for each new site.
The entire page of entries is refreshed every ten minutes by default. To change the interval (in seconds), change 600 in the following line:
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”600″>
That’s all there is to it. It’s cheesy but effective. I like to keep my Consolidated Browser in a Firefox tab for easy access. Throw it on a web server and you can quickly check your sites wherever you go.
You’re free to modify and distribute the file however you’d like. Please let me know if you make any improvements. You don’t have to, of course, but I’d love to hear your ideas.
Right click here and choose Save Link As to download the Consolidated Browser.
Have you been able to get CRL checking to work? I am using mutually authenticated SSL from web service clients to BEA Weblogic on web service calls, but I would like to grab the certificate of the other server used in SSL negotiation in order to check it against a CRL in a proxy service or in the pipeline of ALSB. Let me know if you have any suggestions. Thanks!
Comment by Kevin — August 11, 2006 @ 12:26 pm
Kevin,
You can do this, but to my knowledge you need to write your own CRL checking code, particularly in 8.1.
In 8.1, you can place your CRL code in a custom identity asserter.
In 9.x, you can put the code in a CertPath Validator.
As for ALSB, I know what it stands for but I don’t know anything about it. Sounds like you want to pass a client’s cert as part of the payload? That’s a different problem altogether. The last time I checked (probably 8.1.2 timeframe), WebLogic webservices could not access the client’s certificate like you can do in a servlet/JSP. You can do it in Axis, however.
HTH,
Mike
Comment by Mike Fleming — August 12, 2006 @ 7:59 am