I think the best approach would be to simply have an external process gather data in whatever way it fancies and then push that data to awesome when it's done. For example one could pick apart some Website with a shell script and have it call something like
echo "update_widget("$result")" | awesome-client
with the new data being stored in $result. update_widget() would then
use the data to update the widget and maybe cache some values for
further inspection.
In short, IMHO the easiest and most usable approach is, handle gathering
data in an external process (it's not really the job of a window manager
anyway), use that process to get some meaningful values from the data,
then send the computed results to awesome for display.
--
Gregor Best
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