So, you'll have to write a program that captures the file late on December 31st, and ......
can you elaborate on this please dale?
sounds good.
OK, I don't know how much (if any) computer programming or scripting you know, but let me outline the general principle. Again, I suggest that one of your talented kids could put this together.
1. The .html file that's uploaded every few minutes to your web site, is really just a text file with mostly-consistent strange things for formatting and titles, interspersed with a few characters of data. [As a convenience, a copy of that file is usually present on your computer, as you have noted]
2. It's easy enough to schedule a computer program to run at 23:59:00 on December 31. The program could do something as simple as making a copy of the file to somewhere else on your computer - perhaps with a slightly different name (whatever-2010.html) so that it won't be destroyed by overwriting later. And/or print it.
3. Now, of course, you could just read that file sometime later (New Years day or...) - or display it using a browser. And
manually compare with your web page that displays the "forever extremes", and change those that were higher/lower last year.
You could do all of that yourself (perhaps with a tiny bit of assistance).
4.
But it's a rather simple programming task (if you already know some programming) to do Step #3 using computer code.
Footnote: that's essentially what screen scraping does.
Footnote 2: of course, that just does "forever extremes for past years". You would really want to adjust the extremes when this year's extremes were higher/lower. In the "extreme", that would require looking at every data file and usually not changing any extreme.
