Question about forcing a web browser to stay open.

wke_whitney

I am looking for a little advice. I recently developed stock check system which involves an admin panel that refreshes every thirty seconds to check for new additions to a database. If there is a new addition then a buzzer will sound alerting individuals that action should be taken. This is where the problem lies however, the computer that runs the webpage that refreshes every thirty seconds is a community computer. People keep closing the page by accident thus rendering the system useless since the buzzer will not sound.

Is their any way to check and see if Mozilla or internet explorer are open, and on a certain page?

Is their any sort of toolbar system that could easily be used to run the page minimized.

How hard would it be to make a .exe file to check the database?

I am open to any ideas.

Thanks

etully

You could have the page refresh every 30 seconds and update a database with the current time everytime it checks. Then you could have a cronjob that checks the database to see if the time is ever older than 90 seconds. If so, then the browser was clearly shut down and the cron job should send you an email telling you to start the browser back up.

Or you could spend $300 for a new computer that isn't accessible to the community. You could buy an old 200 MHZ box with 64 MB of RAM for like $20 and that would be MORE than enough machine to run Windows 98.

Houdini

I might check email once a day so what about people that do like that or that don't even check it except when they want to send something?

etully

Then they would go with the 2nd option of buying a used computer for twenty bucks.

It's cheaper to buy a used computer than it is to write software to solve this problem.

bradgrafelman

As etully said, going to a kiosk-type of setup where you have a very simple, low-end computer that does nothing but serve webpages and lock it down tight enough to where users don't have much control over it is probably the best idea.