My girlfriend is signing up for college courses, and she missed out on registration for a particular class that's ideal for the upcoming semester. All sections of the class are full. However, other students may drop/withdraw at any point, opening up a seat that she'd want to register for immediately.
I'm not aware of any auto-notification tool on the college's website. So, rather than reloading this page manually all day long over the next several weeks, I'd like to set something up to auto-notify her if a seat opens up.
What are the best/easiest options to do this?
This is the web page that I would need to monitor:
Here is a screenshot of the specific numbers that I'm interested in:
https://skitch.com/troywarr/gptbe/acc-course-schedule-course-schedule-by-discipline-spring-2012
For any of the five course sections, when the first number (shown in the orange box) drops below 12, I'd like to know as soon as possible.
I envision this being some sort of web scraper that operates on short intervals (like every 5 minutes), checking for changes to the text within the appropriate HTML elements, then interfacing with an SMS system (ideally) or email.
This is important enough to warrant setting up a tool like this, but I don't have more than about a day to devote to it, so I'm hoping that such a tool or service already exists, and would greatly appreciate any recommendations. If not, any suggestions on what tools/languages/technologies to use would be great. Thanks!
It's already been done for you.
http://www.austincc.edu/register/waitlists/
Register for the waitlist and she'll get an email when a spot opens up. It' standard fare at pretty much any educational institute. ;)