It was the day before my flight back to New York from West Palm Beach, Fla. Since I was flying on Southwest Airlines, which has no reserved seating, and since I was reluctant to take the word of the airline attesting that families with small children would have priority, I had to form a plan quickly. I wanted to be first in line on our flight back to New York.
As some of you know, Southwest allows its customers to log in 24 hours ahead of time and “reserve” a spot in line. The faster we were able to reserve the spot (or four spots in case), the earlier we could board and the less anxious my wife and I would be. With a little more than 24 hours to go, I still didn’t have a plan. Sure, I could manually refresh the page by continually pressing F5 every half-second to make sure I would be first to sign up. (We needed to get to a landing page after plugging in our confirmation number, and I was now on that page, and it was telling me that I couldn’t reserve our spaces yet.) But my kids were hounding me, and I needed to let the browser play this waiting game on its own. And I wanted to be first in line.
Letting ‘ReloadEvery’ Do Its Thing
Then I remembered a new Firefox add-on that I had installed a few weeks before the trip. I had wanted a certain page (my FriendFeed friends page) to refresh itself automatically so that I wouldn’t have to do it. The add-on, called ReloadEvery (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/115), reloads a page at any time interval you set up. I asked it to reload the tab with my FriendFeed friends every 2.5 minutes. In fact, you can set it up to…