[Salty]

OK, my school which unfortunately I'm back at, has some network guys that I swear are a lil bit... off... anyway, they used to have the world's worst proxy server set up that would only let things go through on port 8080, that was awful.
This year they grew a brain and are allowing users to do basically most things you could want to do on a campus network, though to stay conneccted to the internet you have to leave a web page of the school home page open that refreshed to keep the connection alive, every 3 minutes.

Anyway so all that goes to say, I've been keeping the window in a safari tab, but it's a bit annoying, so I was thinking perhaps I could create a widget that would run in the background that would load the page that we wouldn't have to see, and I could give it to the other Mac users on campus .

So the first question is, can you have dashboard widgets continue to work and do things even when dashboard isn't active.
And second can anyone point me to a tutorial that would give me a hand working things out?

[registered_user]

yes, you can do it easily.

a widget is just a web page.

you could set your widget up with an ajax request to the school's home page. it'll save you from downloading images. every so often.

but to be quick and dirty:

I don't use iframes, but I think this is the syntax:
<iframe.src="your.school.url" id="myiframe"></iframe>

js would be along the lines of :

window.onload = refresh;
function refresh() {
var f = document.getElementById("myiframe");
f.src = "your.school.url";
window.setTimeout(refresh, 120000); //number is in milliseconds, 2 minutes to be safe
}

[SirCastor]

Tell us how this goes Salty. I'd like to hear the outcome.

[Synotic]

r_u: Would the widget run even if dashboard weren't active?

[registered_user]

Yes, widgets do indeed run when they aren't active.

There are special methods that you have to call to pause the widget when Dashboard is in the background and then to start it back up again.

Though Apple might 'fix' that behavior. The widget environment is poorly implemented currently.