What do you want tracked

Hi all,

After haveing a chat with R% with what he has done with the tracker (excellent work BTW) we were talking about what sites we should include in the tracker, I suggested that we throw this out to all the members.

So the question to you members is

What sites should be included in the tracker?

The sites don't need to be about Supergirl, it can be about any site that has content that we want, it can also include Youtube channels and any other site that has an RSS feed so please post your suggestions below and we will see if they can be added.

Fats

Just to add to what Fats said: the software can potentially track any resource on the web that is publicly accessible, that has an updates model -- that means any web resource that has a concept of new items being added. Could be RSS feeds, could be forum threads, could be fan sites (heroinemovies.com), could be video channels (clips4sale). If the site publishes an RSS of its updates, that makes life easier. If not, then the process gets a little more tricky, as the back end has to try to extract the updates from within the site's HTML code.

What sites do you guys visit to keep up to date on the latest comicbook and superheroine news?


R5

There's been some major updates to the tracker, not just to make it more efficient and robust, but also to widen the range of things it tracks.

The tracker now maintains separate lists of things to track, meaning if you're only interested in (for example) heroine videos and podcasts, you can quickly check out the updates without being bombarded with stuff about the CBS Supergirl. The tracker now tracks these categories...

• Supergirl (CBS) -- including news sites and reviews; plus YouTube channels that repost the official promo videos.
• Comicbook news -- a few popular comicbook news sources, of general interest.
• Heroine videos & podcasts -- a small number of superheroine video sources, commentary, and podcasts.
• Artists [NEW] -- superheroine artists who have DeviantArt or Tumblr accounts.
• Cosplayers [NEW] -- cosplayers who have DeviantArt or Tumblr accounts.

The final three categories need suggestions.

There's some good news, and some bad news...

Bad news first -- after spending a lot of time experimenting, it has become apparent that while the tracker is pretty flexible, it isn't artificially intelligent. It works well for sites that publish their content in a news-like format, with dated updates listed on a page; but it becomes very difficult to scrape data from sites that use complicated e-shopping type layouts. After spending several hours experimenting with various sites, including some of the one's suggested on this thread, I came to the conclusion that it just wasn't worth the hassle every time we want to add a new site to be tracked. I'll keep looking for solutions, but for now we just have to accept that there's a large number of sites that just can't easily be scraped for data without a lot of extra work for each site.

However, don't let this put you off suggesting sites. Sites with RSS feed capabilities (which includes most blog sites, and sites like Tumblr and Deviant Art, as well as YouTube channels and playlists) are particularly easy to add.

Good news -- due to a major rewrite of part of the tracker, the sites it groups together into tracker 'categories' is pretty flexible. This opens up the possibility at some point of allowing users to create their own personal trackers, with a customised blend of all the available sites the tracker knows about. For example, of you really like Spoliertv.com, Supergirl.tv and Brad's DA channel, you could create a personal tracker with just those three sites on it. This feature isn't implemented yet (it would require some way of storing the config data in the SWM site database), but thanks to the flexible way the tracker now configures itself, it would be easy to do in future with a modest amount of extra work.


R5