News on the SWM tracker

Hi all,


I have been working on fixing a issue with the site that has bugged me since we have moved to joomla, that is the tracker.

Some of you will remember that the tracker was a script that would post a list of updated sites that where part of the genre that we inhabit, towards the end of what I would call SWM v1.0 the tracker would give us incorrect results and generally not work the way it was designed to do so.

In the intervening years I’ve sought help in changing the tracker to work in general and work with joomla specifically, over the last 2 years I’ve spent over £5000 in fees to PHP developers to get the code to work and nothing can ever come of it and came to the point that it looked like we would not have the tracker again on the site. As a temporary solution to the problem I put the links on the front page for people to open them in a new tab check the sites themselves.

But there is a solution to the tracker problem and it has come from a direction that I never expected.

Ever so often I get emails outlining the latest and greatest add-ons for joomla one add-on looked interesting, Ninja RSS Syndicator (great name) it's job is to create custom RSS feeds from elements of the site, so after playing about with it I created a new story RSS feed (you will find the button for it at the bottom of every page), I looked at the developers site and discovered a number of add-ons that would not be useful to the site, but one item caught my eye. RSS feed to content, a way for items listed in a RSS feed returned in to content for the site, but alas it was for joomla 1.5 (we are on Joomla 2.5). I was on the chat room with Njae and he said “wouldn’t it be nice for something like that for the blog” so after looking around the net I found what I could use, a RSS to Blog entry plug in for wordpress.

So I looked at the list of web links that we have and went through them and added any RSS or ATOM feeds and low and behold we had a ton of them, some of the older sites still don’t have RSS feeds, (I can help set up RSS feeds for any site that wants it).

Once I loaded the feeds I clicked update and BANG 130 something posts appeared on the Front Page blog from the 13 feeds, my first thought was “cool” my second thought was “bummer too much for the front page”, so now I’m working on developing a page in the site that will display all the feeds on to one page and will act as a “Tracker” for the site.

I know that this a long post but I wanted to give you a feel for the development process that goes on here.

A list of sites that the tracker will follow at this point is :-

• Brawna - Female muscle stories
• cultretro.com
• DC Women Kicking Ass
• deviantART: DavidCMatthews's Journals
• deviantART: hoppers13's journals
• deviantART: SuperCDR's Journals
• deviantART: supergirldafc's journals
• deviantART: tarrass20020's journals
• Supergirl Comic Box Commentary
• Supergirl: Maid of Might
• UltraCharged
• WonderWomanTV
• Amaz0ns

If your site is not on this list and you have a RSS or Atom feed let me know and I’ll add it, if your site has no RSS feed and you would like to know how to add one let me know in this thread.

Fats