A nice slogan for a t-shirt! Bit long, maybe…
Not so long is the list of new pointers I’ve added to the Amiga Pointer Archive. It’s just these four guys:
One of them is a blog reader submission, taken from a 1992 utility disk (thanks, LocalH!), and another one was a sketch by myself to test the social media sharing feature of the minisite. The other two appeared after the big update – I did a fresh scan of pouët links and went foraging at some FTP sites. And fixed some bugs while I was at it!
In the end, about a thousand new disk images showed up, but after filtering, nearly all the pointers on them were already in the database. That’s disappointing (in numbers), but also cool: I wasn’t missing a ton of pointers as I feared. I did try my best, though:
- RAR files weren’t processed at all (many pouët prod links have them)
- Neither were LHA archives
- Buried in the code was a
val limit = 100000from debugging, and the number of ADF files was of course just above that - Upper-case file extensions like were ignored
Most of all I’m glad I resisted the temptation of passing arbitrary condiments, i. e. clean up the code and do a “proper” rewrite. The pointer-file collecting process has become a convoluted mix of self-written programs, external tools, and manual steps.
Painful, but with a rewrite and a cool new über-tool I would still be in the stage of building an ivory tower of code without anything to show for it.
One thing I might add in the future is a method to submit hand-drawn pointers directly to the archive – people are drawing not nearly enough Amiga mouse cursors nowadays! :)
Go visit the archive, see if you can spot the four new additions, and have fun exploring! Maybe even start pixelling a new pointer and save a handy URL for later, using the “export” button…
