Screencast: Boost your productivity with XRefresh

Are you really frustrated to switch from your text editor to your browser to see the changes you’ve applied? In this screencast Aslam shows you how you can boost your productivity by using XRefresh.

Please see the show notes to fix the gotcha addressed in the screencast.

Screencast: Boost your productivity with XRefresh
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I use ubuntu and the last time I checked this, it wasn't so reliable (it seems to link to another similar system for unix now). So, I made a similar, but much more light weight based on php and a simple bookmarklet.

The idea is that I click the bookmarklet on the page on which I want the images and styles to watched for changes, and the page starts pinging a local php resource (running on apache) to check for changes. When the php detects a change, that particular resource (css or img or swf) is reloaded, instead of refreshing the entire page.

This setup didn't require an additional server running, neither a browser extension, but is limited to apache and php, which was good enough for me at the time.

PS. Now I moved on from apache+php, if anyone is interested in this, the code is at https://bitbucket.org/sharat87/pollfresh/src/tip/pollfresh.p... is just a php file, put it in your webroot and open it through apache. I don't know if it should still work, but one can easily get it to run.