Re: [44net] - > What about the future ?

I have been thinking about that before. My idea was to setup a search site which has a database of existing services, where a visitor could search by different attributes of an entry, where possible with a user interface that suggests valid values. So not a "google" style textbox where you can only search for things of which you already know the name, but also can "explore" and find new unknown things (e.g. a service type is a dropdown list or there is a page with all known types and links that you can click to search them). Now the major problem is "how do we keep this uptodate". It is quite common that someone newly active on the Dutch network experiments and installs something like a "HamServer Pi" and would register it in the database. But maybe after a couple of weeks he reprograms the Pi for something else and that entry would remain in the database and people trying to visit it would encounter a timeout. As I also do not really like systems that are constantly probing and scanning to find new services, my idea was to devise some way where a service would automatically refresh its entry by re-submitting it, and the search engine would only display entries that have been recently refreshed. (e.g. once per week or so) With such a system, the risk of stale entries is a lot less. But I have not yet devised a way to refresh entries without limiting the platform on which they can run (a Linux or Windows system can easily schedule a job that runs some program to post a form, but I do not want to limit too much what platforms can provide and auto-refresh services) Rob