Keeping up with AtariAge (but just the parts I want)

[raindog]

Those of you who've read my posts in the past know that I'm just here for the homebrew; the Stella list is effectively dead, and this is really all that's left, amidst all the buying, selling and off-topic banter. I have a Google alert on my own name, and today it came up with a result on the AtariAge forums; someone was asking a question about my 11-year-old Space Invaders hack. In the course of responding to it, I found out that apparently there's a "Harmony Cart" homebrew flash cartridge now that basically makes my Cuttle Cart obsolete. That would be what I'd consider pretty big Atari news. In the old days, it would have been all over the Stella mailing list, like the Cuttle Cart and its 7800 sequel were, but apparently "email is hard."

 

I have AtariAge in my RSS feeds. Nothing about the Harmony there. I gave up on keeping up with the AtariAge forums years ago because while I can handle my 800-1000 incoming emails a day thanks to automated filtering, I can never remember to visit a web site each day to see what's new (and Stella used to come to me, not the other way around). But at some point I added the RSS feed for the Game Programming forums, in an effort to keep up. I looked today, and it was completely blank. No idea how long it's been that way, but it seems there might be a problem with it. I used the forum search on the Game Programming forums for any topics about the Harmony; there were none. There were some posts about it in the Marketplace forum, which has far too many non-homebrew-relevant posts to follow, and apparently at some point it's gotten its own forum.

 

Looks like I found the Harmony in time to get one, but it makes me wonder what else I've been missing in the 2600 homebrew world because of the clunky nature of web forum software. I'm considering writing a scraper or Yahoo pipe for those forums I'm interested in since the RSS feeds I'm interested in seem to be broken, possibly scraping the other forums for keywords like "homebrew" or "flash" as well, since that wouldn't have been enough in this case. But I want to make sure there's not already some other mechanism available for me to get stuff I deem interesting sent to me automatically through email or RSS -- without drinking from a firehose -- before I start reinventing the wheel (I assume there isn't, since Invision's still very Web 1.0). Am I missing something here?

 

Rob

[Albert]

I hadn't posted news about the Harmony as Batari was having no problems selling the "pre-production" runs and I didn't want to potentially overwhelm him by posting news about it. But now that he's gotten past that point, it's probably due for the front page. You won't have any problems getting your hands on a Harmony cart.

 

One thing I have toyed around with is allowing for stored keyword searches and having the forum send you a daily or weekly digest. However, this could be pretty resource intensive when the searches are run and there is great potential for abuse if not kept in check. I actually modified the forum to immediately email me when new posts with specific terms are entered, but that would be too resource intensive to offer to everyone.

 

I do agree with you that if you don't visit the forums on a regular basis it's easy to miss stuff. The RSS feeds for the forum aren't particularly useful either--I'll look to see if the RSS mechanism is even working (it's possible Invision has broken them in some fashion). You can subscribe to individual forums you're interested in and get emails when new topics are started--the emails contain the subject and entire text of the message. You can also have the forum send you daily or weekly digests, which you can filter to your heart's content.

 

I imagine it might be possible to use Google to do what you want, but Google cannot see any of the off topic forums (which you may not care about anyway). It's not something I've experimented with, but Google does index the forum quite frequently.

 

..Al