Shiny App for Polling Forums

In 2010, Crystal Palace FC were in administration and had 10 points deducted during the year. They only survived in the Championship on the last day of the season

A year ago, they started the league with three consecutive losses and were relegation favourites.

Fast forward 12 months and they are again strong tips for the drop but this time from the Premier League. Last weekend, a player who was playing non-league football not so long ago bagged the winner for their first three points of the new season

It has been quite a ride for their supporters, including myself, and has led to a significant increase in volume on the forums the supporters website, holmesdale.net

As a Shiny developer, I thought it would be useful to have a web app which regularly polls the forums, thus saving on many link clicks to find the latest coverage – which admittedly is the usual mixture of interesting comment, lame banter and swear words

For me, the most interesting aspects as far as development is concerned are

• Application of ‘invalidateLater’ which reactivates the function that scrapes the web pages on a proscribed time basis e.g 30 minutes, alterable by the user
• Enactment of the progress bar, a new feature of the shiny-incubator package
• Use of the dataTables component of the rCharts package, which allows sorting and searches

I will probably add a couple of extra features but a working version can be found here

I would definitely be interested in doing similar work for items of more general usage
so any suggestions are very welcome (64)