AutoHotkey Community

Hey there,

I just realized that AHK has made quite a leap since I last updated (v1.0.39), so I've probably missed a number of helpful new features.
Therefore, I'd love to see a newsletter or, even better, an RSS/ATOM feed of the changelog page (which, in contrast to a newsletter, would hardly require additional maintenance). That'd ensure that I'll never miss an update again.

Does anyone agree? How hard would it be (i.e. how long would it take ) to implement this?

This might not be what you had in mind, but there's an AHK mailing list (Yahoo) that you can join (if you haven't already). However, announcements are currently sent out only for major releases (such as 40, 41, etc.)

The latest release hasn't yet been announced on there, but will be soon.

Alright, I've subscribed.

Maybe I can dig up some website monitor that I can point to the changelog page so I get notified of smaller updates as well.

Since the changelog is fairly large, it is preferable if any automatic scripts instead check the following file:
http://www.autohotkey.com/download/CurrentVersion.txt

Here is a topic that gives a script to monitor it:
http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7273

There are also some more elaborate scripts (at least one) that will automatically update your version when a new release comes out. A search on auto-update and similar might find them.

Maybe we could use http://www.feedyes.com or http://feed43.com?
I haven't figured out how exactly that works though (kinda busy atm; leaving for the UK next week).

I had a look at both services and I succeeded to define a RSS feed for AHK updates in http://feed43.com (I didn't manage with the other service you mention)
It took me a while to figure out how to use it, but anyway, the here's the RSS feed link:
http://feed43.com/8311730502172720.xml
(you can add this link directly to your favourite RSS feed client or click it to open it in feed43 and see how it looks)

I used the changelog page (http://www.autohotkey.com/changelog/) as the source for new RSS items.
After examining the HTML code of that page, I realised there's a common pattern in each changelog entry. For example:

So, I determined the "Items' Titles" for the RSS would be located within the tags <h3></h3> and the content for every item would be the following text up to the <hr> tag.
I also defined that the link to open for each RSS item is the download page (http://www.autohotkey.com/download/) since... where else would you go when you see there's a new version?

The results are more than acceptable (as long as Chris keeps the current layout of the changelog page )

However, there are three items for which you don't see their Title ("1.0.43.10 - April 28, 2006", for example). The reason is that there are some extra empty <h3></h3> tags just before the correct <h3>1.0.43.10 - April 28, 2006</h3> code. In other words, the HTML code looks like this:

If Chris would be so kind to get rid of these empty <h3></h3> appearing in the page, the RSS would work flawlessly

Finally, here's the link to Edit the RSS feed:
http://feed43.com/feed.html?name=8311730502172720
NOTE that the RSS feed works as it is configured right now, so PLEASE PLEASE don't mess with it and, if it doesn't work, please post it here before start making changes. Alternatively, you can check the settings I used and create your own RSS feed (which is free) and post your link here. The settings may look quite simple, but it took me quite a lot of time of trial and error to get the desired output.

Enjoy!

That's great, jordi!
Seems to work perfectly fine.

Thanks a lot for the effort!!

Nice work.

As you suggested, I've removed the empty H3 tags (Dreamweaver puts them in sometimes). I'll try to add an automatic purge to keep them out of there in future versions.

Thanks.

Thanks Chris!
Now the item titles are correctly detected!
Great way to keep notified of new AHK updates!

Chris
Since some time ago, I've noticed that the feed I created (see my post above) was broken due to a change in format of the changelog page.
I updated the feed definition to the new format and it should work again (just in case people using that feed to catch up AHK updates were wondering what happened)

Thanks for taking care of that, and sorry for the inconvenience.

Since some time ago, the AHK feed I created in feed43.com reports:
Although I was waiting some time to see whether they would restore their free service, it looks like they are not really "working hard" enough. So I'm dropping this feed as a means to keep up-to-date with AHK new releases.

What are the RSS alternatives?
1) Use the RSS feed from the AHK forums: In my case, I just want to get notified as soon as a new AHK version is release (as opposed to monitoring all forum messages activity), so the most suitable feed would be the one from the "Announcements" section: http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/rss.php?f=6
The downside is that there's a feed item for every post in that forum (even for the "wow! great! well done Chris!" messages -totally deserved by the way), so new feed items don't necessarily mean a new AHK updates. It's a minor issue, since it takes little time to check the new post contents to check whether it's related to a new update or just "words of praise".

2) Use the RSS feed from sourceforge.net: I just got to know that Chris decided to list AHK in sourceforce (as stated in this message) - which I think it's an excellent move. So, sourceforge offers a variety of feeds to keep track of the projects. If, as in my case, we want to keep track of new AHK file releases, the relevant RSS feed would be:
http://sourceforge.net/export/rss2_projfiles.php?group_id=182593 (at the moment there's only one item, since AHK has been just newly included in sourceforge). The advantage of this RSS feed is that it notifies exclusively of new file releases, so no "words of praise" posts included . It also can be a means for Chris to save bandwidth (since I would use sourceforge for both RSS updates and new AHK version downloads).

In short, it looks like sourceforge's RSS feed can suit my needs better that the forums RSS feed. For the time being, I'll keed both of them in my RSS feed reader and see whether Chris will keep sourceforge versions as up-to-date as in AHK forum page.

Sorry for the long post, but I though this could be useful for people who were using the (now defunct) feed43.com feed.

I've been using the RSS feeds of these two sites for years now. Guess I'm a bit late in replying eh, could have saved you guys a lot of time

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4422
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Au ... 88127602/1

Although these sites don't have an exclusive feed for a single program, they do have a notification by mail option. Their regular feeds do however mention whenever a new release of AHK is out. Fileforum's feeds also give the changelog details.

Personally, I subscribe to both these feeds and I've set my reader to highlight/alert whenever AutoHotkey is updated.

In case you don't mind being notified via e-mail, there are two newsletters. One of them is for major releases only, and the other one is all releases (major and minor). They're only for announcements, so you won't see any spam on them (or even any discussions).