PHP - How to query a forum?

I'm new to PHP, and love it. I want to write a script that send's my phone a text message whenever someone I follow posts on a forum. This could be any of the forums I follow.

Is there a way to do this?

For instance, let's say I want to follow someone who posts on Hacker News. Could I run a cron job that checks if tha开发者_运维知识库t person has made new posts each morning? How?

You could, this is all "assumptions" on my part tho.

If you have an RSS feed for each forum, you could grab this feed and based on the feed then email your cell phone (say AT&T you send to NUMBER@txt.att.net.. something along those lines, check your cell carrier site).

Another method would be if the forums notify your script/server in some way, again this is a big assumption. You could go out of your way to even check incoming email on an smtp/pop mail box.

There are a number of ways to do what you are asking, some can be difficult, some easy.

Things like a cronjob / curl / rss notify / twitter account for notifications only, etc;