My Experience: I have done zero web programming.

Background: The Bitx40 is a 40 meter Ham transcevier kit. Designed by Ashar Farhan as a very economical entry point for Indian Hams into Single Sideband(SSB) amateur radio, the Bitx40 has now become popular with Hams world wide. This low power(QRP) radio is an excellent platform for experimentation with both hardware and Arduino software(the VFO and display). A very active discussion group is located at https://groups.io/g/BITX20/topics. A group member has created a google map(http://BITXmap.com) that members may add their location to.

The Problem: The map creater would prefer to not be the map Czar and would like to leave the map open for members to maintain their own information. Unfortunately, bungled updates have trashed portions of the map several times. The map can be backed up by manually downloading a .kml file, a royal pain...

The Map: The map has two panes. The left pane is information/configuration oriented. The right pane is the map. One of the left pane pull-down menus leads to a "Download KML File" choice. Clicking through several pop-up boxes will download the .kml file.

Possible Solution: It would seem that a Perl script in a cron job could automate these backups.

The Question: Is this a reasonable approach and where are the snakes?

Hey, it's a start.

#! /usr/bin/perl

# Script to experiment with the WWW::Mechanize::Firefox module
#    Must install WWW::Mechanize::Firefox from CPAN(sudo cpanm WWW::Me
+chanize::Firefox)
#    Must install MozRepl Firefox plug-in Tools->Add-ons
#        (MozRepl is in the Firefox Web Development Add-ons section)
#    Must start MozRepl from Firefox Tools->MozRepl->Start

use strict;
use warnings;

use WWW::Mechanize::Firefox;

# Bring up the Bitx Map, Firefox needs to be running in this version

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize::Firefox->new( activate => 1 );
    $mech->get('http://BITXmap.com');

# ???Click through to download .kml file to backup the map(add to cron
+ job???)
[download]

James