Let the browser do the walking

If you're a news junkie, imagine a Web-based program that does the following. First, it pops over to your 10 or 12 favourite newspaper web-sites each day. Then it pulls out the contents of each page and automatically stitches the 10 or 12 pages together and delivers them to you as one nice, long web-page.

The free Quickbrowse service (www.quickbrowse.com) has some other nifty tricks too. For example, it can eliminate all the pictures and most advertisements on the pages. Best of all, it has an automated email delivery option: the amalgamation of the 10 or 12 pages - or almost any combination of web-pages you fancy - is delivered to you by email at certain times that you decide, on a daily or weekly basis. For instance, if three particular newspapers have a fashion section on Mondays, you can instruct Quickbrowse to email you all three sections automatically every Monday morning.

Quickbrowse is the brainchild of Mark Fest (32), a German journalist working as a foreign correspondent in Miami. Fest created Quickbrowse to cope with his own need to scan through the sites of most of the major US newspapers daily. He was fed up of the tedious, time-consuming process of having to go in person to the same sites for his daily news-fix.

"As a German news correspondent, I have to visit 20 or so newspaper sites on the Web every day. Since I didn't find a program that puts them all on one page, I started to write one myself last December."

Quickbrowse is already highly customisable, and as easy to use as a Web-based email account such as Hot-mail. Simply type in the list of URLs (Web addresses) you want Quickbrowse to retrieve, and a name you want to call this collection of URLs. You can configure and manage dozens of these different URL collections and how they are delivered.

To get an idea of how it works, the site cleverly provides some "pre-programmed" news sites to give you a demo. Other useful features include the ability to block images (including those pesky ads), or to turn the collections of web-pages into downloadable text-files.

Fest did all the programming behind Quickbrowse himself in Perl. "Programming has been my hobby since I first got exposed to it using Apple IIs during an exchange student year in New Jersey when I was 16 years old." He says all the initial teething problems have been sorted. "At this point it works with almost any site, even those that use passwords, use frames or have Web addresses that change every day."

For the email delivery option Quickbrowse first sends a validation email, which must be answered. "This guarantees that Quickbrowse users can't send pages to recipients that haven't requested them."

As for future plans, he hopes to have Spanish and German versions of the site, and to upgrade Quickbrowse to work with "sites using exotic HTML", and even allow users to have Quickbrowse pages delivered to multiple email addresses.

"The great thing is users sending in suggestions all the time. I now know why software companies release beta versions," he says. "You know how one has to go through all these result pages with search engines like Yahoo, Altavista or Dejanews? Have you ever wished that they would display not 25 results per page, but, let's say, 500? Well, I want to add a feature to Quickbrowse that will do exactly that."

Fest says he has no plans to add advertising to the site, although "if Microsoft or AOL calls me up with an offer to buy Quickbrowse I'll give it a thought or two".

mick@volta.net