Pinging

[jonathanhou]

Hey,

Have a quick question.

I want to either use some sort of coding or software to ping a particular website's url so that a page is generated. I'm not doing this for search engine purposes which is all i can find when searching in google.

For instance, I want to ping www.whatever.com/a-ton-of-text-here

Thanks for any help you can provide.

[jonathanhou]

I forgot to mention that I would like to set it up on a schedule to ping everyday at a certain time.

Thanks,

[svidgen]

If you have access to a *nix (or OS X) machine, set up a cron (http://www.manpagez.com/man/8/cron/) job that curl (http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/curl/)'s the url.

If you're running windows, set up a task using Task Scheduler. (not sure what the best option to just fetch a URL is in windows)

[jonathanhou]

Thanks.

How do you setup a task scheduler in Windows?

[svidgen]

Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Task Scheduler

You might be able to schedule a browser to open to a URL and then "terminate" the job after N seconds or something like that. Not 100% sure ...

Might try some googling for the best solution here. Maybe look into "site monitoring" solutions -- I think you can basically hand a "site monitoring" tool a set of URLs to test/fetch every day. So, if you don't need the results and just need to trigger some server-side action, that may actually be the way to go.

[jonathanhou]

Great, thanks a lot for your help.