New RSS news feeds / aggregator in testing

[System]

As some of you might have noticed, there's been a few changes in the news department.  Read on for a list of changes and how they will affect Amiga.org.

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First and foremost, just like the Amiga itself, we're a little late entering the 21st century on some things.  To make up for it, we now have active RSS feeds from Amiga.org.  This means that those of you running AmRSS or another program like Mozilla Firefox can now add "live bookmarks" to your browser, giving you instant links to the latest news, forum feeds, and links that have been added on Amiga.org.

You can find these feeds at http://www.amiga.org/forums/external.php?type=RSS2.  You can also add them directly by the little orange buttons on the front page

But that's only one side of the coin.

As of this afternoon, we began testing on a new "XML/RSS news aggregator" program which actually goes out on the Web and brings news into Amiga.org.  

The time for competition between Amiga Web sites (if there ever was a need for competition) is over.  Using the new aggregator program, we will post stories as we find them, giving full credit to the original site by way of posting the original link.  This way, people still end up at the original site to read the full article, getting them more traffic, and everyone should be happy.  We see this as supporting the community, not just Amiga.org.  That's what's most important

If you have an Amiga-related site with an English XML RSS feed that you would like us to consider adding, please let Wayne know.

Last but not least is the addition of both Aminet recent file listings as well as those of OS4depot on the front page.  To say that we've had fun with RSS today is an understatement.

[System]

Hmmm.  How to adequately explain this?

Put very, very simply, the Amiga community is still shrinking.  I know that comes as a surprise to no one, but what that means is that there is less, and less news.  Out of the five or so sites that people really remember, every single one pretty much always has the exact same news stories.  We miss some, they miss some.

What this will hopefully do, is to make it where it truly doesn't matter.  The time of competing should be long gone by now, and it's only the sheer ego of a very few in this community that keep the "bad mojo" going.

In short, please.  Continue to post your own "local stories".  With RSS, everyone else will have it sooner than later anyway, as well they should so there's really no such thing as a "local" story any more.  Welcome to the 21st century folks.

Perhaps if we sat all the silly crap aside, we could actually help to keep the platform going rather than to continually try and divide the community into oblivion.

Another problem, and smaller reason behind this is that even with a staff of 10 (or 50 if you count all the sites combined), it's just impossible to cover all the stories all the time.  Some developers have gotten to where they only post stories here.  Some have gotten to where they only post stories elsewhere.  Who does that really help?  Certainly not the Amiga community...

Amiga news should be universal here folks, as long as proper credit and respect is given.

Oh yeah, the reason that the news articles today rotated so quickly is simply that it was the first time the new program had successfully run.  Because of that, there were many "backfill" stories over the last few weeks which had not made their way here yet.  As the program is finalized, it will run about once every four hours, and the admins can simply approve news as they normally would, at a much slower pace.

Seriously, we're kinda digging the whole concept of non-competition here, but we're not married to it.  If you have ideas or feedback, please let me know.  I'll be happy to consider any constructive ideas.  After all, we're supposed to be SUPPORTING the Amiga, not tearing it down.

Wayne

If you run an Amiga site and don't know how to set up RSS, lemme know.  It's fairly straight forward.

[System]

I have no plans to use it on "real news sites".

If someone gets that upset over the idea, all they have to do is ask and I'll make sure not to grab their RSS feed any more.  It would sadden me to see anyone who believes they're bigger than the cause they purport to serve however, so I can only hope that won't happen.

[System]

The code that generates RSS for Amiga.org's news feed isn't mine.  When they upgrade it, I'll upgrade.  Until then, that little part's out of my hands.  

Besides, all these sites always have the same news, so the RSS feed makes absolutely no difference there.  Almost everyone makes the rounds submitting the exact same news item to each site, so it really shouldn't make a big difference in the grand scheme of things.

Wayne