There are some practical approaches you can try, but I see two basic difficulties with your core idea.

...I look to a node and discover that it needs to be studied. I give the ID to the supost program, and it fetches the node and show me,...

That suggests a solution based on heuristics about authors and titles and the tree of replies, but prevents decisions based on the content.

The larger problem is that you want machine evaluation of human expression -- understanding of speech. That holy grail has been drifting just out of reach for a very long time.

PM does have XML feeds, including 'newest nodes', so heuristics like I mentioned are possible in limited bandwidth.

After Compline,
Zaxo

Setup a Squid Web Proxy Cache (link) or something similar. Configure it so that it caches www.perlmonks.org forever.

Browse as normal, every page you see will be cached.

Clean it up every once in a while.

use LWP;
use HTTP::Request::Common;

use strict;
use constant URL => 'http://perlmonks.org/index.pl';

$|++;

my $node = shift;
print "USAGE: $0 [node_id]\n" and exit unless $node;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->agent('node_grabber/1.0 (' . $ua->agent .')');

my $request  = POST(URL, Content => [ node_id => $node ] );
my $response = $ua->request($request) or die "can't download id $node"
+;
my $html     = $response->content();
my ($date)   = $html =~ /a>\s*on\s*([^<]+?)<\/font/i;
my ($title)  = $html =~ /<title>([^<]+)<\/title>/;

my $chunk;
my @ends = (
   qr|<BR>\s*<hr\s*\/>|,
   qr|<BR>\s+<BR><font size=2><I>|,
   qr|<CENTER>\s+back to <A HREF="|,
   qr|<BR>go see more <A HREF="|,
   qr|<center><TABLE width=|,
); 

foreach (@ends) {
   ($chunk) = $html =~ /<INPUT type=hidden name=op value=vote>(.*)(?:$
+_)/ms;
   last if $chunk;
}

unless ($chunk) {
   ($chunk) = $html =~ /<!--\s+-->(.*)(?:<!--\s+-->)/ms;
}

print "couldn't parse it :(\n" and exit unless $chunk;
print "$title [$date]\n", $chunk;
[download]

P.S. an RSS feed that grabbed just a node sure would be nice. :)

UPDATE (April 2,2002): Kanji just /msg'ed me about displaytype=xml (i could have sworn that this was broken some time ago). This will make the above code not only overkill, but just plain silly. I'll be working on a replacement in the meantime this morning. And there it is below ---> ;)

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

This is soooo much better. It should last a lot longer without maintenance as well.

use LWP;
use XML::Simple;
use HTTP::Request::Common;

use strict;
use constant URL => 'http://perlmonks.org/index.pl';

my $node = shift;
print "USAGE: $0 [node_id]\n" and exit unless $node;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->agent('node_xml_grabber/1.0 (' . $ua->agent .')');

my $request  = POST(URL, Content => [
   node_id     => $node,
   displaytype => 'xml',
]);

my $response = $ua->request($request) or die "no download id $node";
my $content  = $response->content();
my $xml      = XMLin($content) or die "xml error!";
my $date     = scalar localtime($xml->{ucreatetime}->{content});

print <<EOF;

$xml->{title}->{content} by [$xml->{author_user}->{content}]
on $date

$xml->{doctext}->{content}
EOF
[download]

Big thanks to Kanji :)

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)