I was wondering if there was a simple way to automate a task for, lets say, Firefox to get the crude inventory number as it is released each Wednesday on the EIA's website. I think it would be great if there was a way to crop the number from the report and have a little browser window pop up with it as soon as it is released.
From what I have seen the current report always comes out with the same web address each week:
I also noticed that the number always shows up at the exact same spot on the report, the 2nd line of the 1st sentence of the 3rd paragraph, like so:
"U.S. commercial crude oil inventories (excluding those in the Strategic Petroleum
Reserve) increased by 5.3 million barrels from the previous week."
I have no programming skills but it seems that with the consistency of the number's location it may be possible to script. This might also be an easy way to bypass lagging financial news feeds as well as avoid having to subscribe to a service for that one report.
I have tried this with Windows 8 Task Scheduler but the software can only refresh the task at the earliest 1 minute after task fails, in the likely event that the EIA servers are saturated upon the news release. For this to be effective the script would have to refresh instantly and as many times as needed until the report has been successfully accessed and the number cropped (time is of course of the essence). My initial assumption was that everything would have to run within the web browser itself to avoid having to open other programs during execution, and save as much time as possible. Such a script could also used to schedule other reports in the same way should the conditions of their release be similar. My guess is that most weekly or monthly report formats are relatively consistent.
Does anyone know how feasible this would be or if anything else like this is already available?