ANS unveils new look website | Drobe.co.uk archives

ANS unveils new look website

By Chris Williams. Published: 7th May 2004, 23:21:02 | Permalink | Printable

Pretty and useful

The Acorn News Service has this week launched its new website, which renders well in RISC OS and non-RISC OS browsers. The ANS publish a free fortnightly RISC OS related newsletter online and also via email.

The newsletter is edited by James Sears, using news gathered from various sources, but was originally founded in 1998 by Eytan Abrahams. Stephen Courtney is ANS's current web master and the newsletter is available in German and French - more translators are also sought, if you're multilingual and want to contribute.

"I think ANS provides a useful summary of recent news, complementing the likes of Drobe, Iconbar, RISCOS.org etc. by delivering information straight into your inbox," Stephen explained to drobe.co.uk. Tired of sarcasm and our lazy reporting? ANS may be up your street then, because they keep news to the point and as Stephen added, "We don't really go in for editorials."

"As for the reason we keep going, I suppose it's become a habit now, and we've certainly built up a nice historical archive of announcements too. The site James created at the time of the Phoebe cancellation is still around too at www.acornusers.org/phoenix. With a rewrite of the Filebase system currently underway (don't ask when it'll be ready though), I think we'll be around for a while longer yet."

The ANS filebase, hosted alongside the ANS website by James on acornusers.org, has also recently gained an RSS feed for file updates.

Links

New ANS website

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Discussion

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hmm, the new ANS site is really nice. Job well done, I say!

It seems the ANS is another one of those excellent resources that keeps itself rather quiet. But anyway, I subscribed now so that's the important thing. :o)

fylfot on 8/5/04 4:38AM
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The ANS RSS feed appears to fail if the client accessing the page is 'Moilla/3.0 (compatible)'. You get back a 'Forbidden' response code.

Seems like a rather pointless restriction really. It not only prevents a legitimate browser from fetching the page, but also prevents FeedReader from fetching the page.

IF you deviate slightly from that version string, say by using '1.0' or 'compatiblish' it works fine. But apparently that particular string is bad. <sigh>

Gerph on 8/5/04 4:58AM
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I'm with fylfot on this one - except that I subscribe now. Now that is the important thing.

martin on 8/5/04 7:08AM
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gerph> Why don't you email the site webmaster directly about your problem? rather than whinge about it on the comments area on Drobe. I'm sure they would be more than willing to help fix the problem.

piemmm on 8/5/04 8:17AM
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I do like that ANS seems to use RSS to show the new drobe news on their site :laugh:

hzn on 8/5/04 12:08PM
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Shame for what looks like a XHTML+CSS page it's actually HTML4 with oodles of tables :/

NoMercy on 8/5/04 12:09PM
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pie: I think Gerph highlighted the problem in a drobe comment for the benefit of anyone else who may be using a client that sends a Mozilla/3 useragent, and is perplexed as to why the feed is forbidden for them. Plus, he could have emailed Stephen too.

Chris. Just me.

diomus on 8/5/04 12:38PM
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diomus: It's not actually problem with the feed code itself, it's actually something in the Apache config (James is looking into it). Hopefully it'll be fixed fairly soon.

NoMercy: Yes, the site could easily have been created entirely using XHTML and CSS, but how many RISC OS browsers (apart from Netsurf) would then be able to display it correctly? I'd imagine that Drobe is tables-based for similar reasons.

Stephen

barti on 8/5/04 1:59PM
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The problem with Feedreader is now cured - Apache had some anti-harvesting blocks in place and one was to block agents that said they were Mozilla compatible without specifying what they actually were. Perhaps Feedreader will change at some point to include it's name in the user agent string?

barti on 8/5/04 3:04PM
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Effective, well structured, useable and informative site now. HTML 4 or XHTML+CSS doesn't matter.

Gollum on 9/5/04 8:00PM
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I've been subscribed to ANS for years, it is a great service. Thanks to everyone involved.

Hey, the stats page has been updated. It's quite interesting to see where subscribers come from. Iceland and Oman are two surprises.

knutson on 9/5/04 9:24PM
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