Ask HN: Can I make a front end to an existing website?

1 points by jecs321 12y ago ↗ HN

I am a grad student that works a lot in nanofabrication. My school has a website that controls all the scheduling for the tools that I use (SEM, etchers, evaporators, etc.), but the user interface is horrible, especially for mobile. I want to create a new mobile website, which takes the information from the existing website after I've logged-in and re-displays it in better format. I'd rather not require a server and have to parse the html that I'm receiving from the existing website in Python. Can I do this in simple HTML and Javascript?

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restlake 12y ago ↗

Greasemonkey on the desktop (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/) or for Firefox Mobile, or userscripts on the desktop (http://userscripts.org/) might be a way to accomplish this, the Python requirement aside. They're a simpler way to restyle and format an existing site in your browser, rather than writing code to parse an existing site. Alternatively, as you mentioned, you could write or utilize an existing scraper in Python and pull content into your own site, as long as you are not violating the terms of use for your school's website.