Aufero on Extensibility

Warning: Contains rambling.

People's taste, preferences, the vast amount and the variety of information on the Internet makes it impossible for any kind of software to cover.

Err. Let's take a step back: Aufero gathers information about media by looking at your local network and on the Internet. In order to not wander around aimlessly it uses a set of reliable information sources. The types of these include, but not limited to reviews, torrents, general information. Now, we all have our preferences as to where we go for this information; blogs, commercial sites or simply reviews of our own...

Aufero's take on this is to not shove a fixed set down your throat, its goal is just to see to it that you get the information you want, served to you. In your couch. In order to do this there had to be some way of administering the sources of information. So, allow me to introduce the latest member of the Aufero family: "Aufero Two Foot".

Aufero Two Foot
Aufero Two Foot got its somewhat obvious name from the fact that it should be used on the desktop at a 2' distance as opposed to using a remote control at a 10' distance. The most common use will be by people remoting into their Media Center using Remote Desktop. In general I don't really picture users doing this very often since Aufero will still make some default sets available through some mean.

"Through some mean?" Yes. See, Aufero itself will always remain a clean product, it does not intend to serve users with means to get to those evil P2P-networks (so MPAA says) like, for instance, BitTorrent swarms. That's just an added bonus. The conclusion here is Aufero will not include any information sources in the default setup package. That is up to you to get ... somehow. I bet you're sighing already: "Why make it so complicated?", I won't answer that question this bloggage, but I can share the good news here: It is extremely easy to share your information sources with others. In fact, you click a button and you will have a text-file which can be mailed, blogged, posted on a forum or quoted(!) over a telephone line. And then this is ready to be imported into Aufero.

My first Information Source?
How will the initial information set be shared then? Well, you will be able to point "Aufero Two Foot" to any Internet address (RSS feed, blog, forum) or copy/paste it into ATF and it will set itself up. And you're set to go and you will never have to worry about it again unless you want to. Someone (me? you?) will inevitably set up some forum for sharing this and other information around Aufero.

Blog 'em!
Aufero Two Foot's job is an ungrateful one. Its task is from day one to make itself obsolete so you will never have to open it. In other words, it will allow you to set it to subscribe to a blog with shared data. This will give Aufero a steady stream of new Information Sources as they are made available by other fellow Aufero users. Naturally, you should only point Aufero to blogs that you trust with giving you this kind of information. This is pretty cool if I may say so myself. :)

Something's missing...
The readers paying attention are now thinking: Eh. What is shared, exactly? Right. Well, Aufero Two Foot takes a bit of getting used to and you really have to know about something called "Regular Expressions". While most of the world does not have the patience or the knowledge to fiddle with this kind of nonsense, there is a big population out there that does have the patience and the know-how for this. And those are the friendly souls you will learn to appreciate and love if you want to hook Aufero up to something new. What they produce is what will be shared.

I'm not talking rocket science here: Setting up a new information source for someone who knows how to do it shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes.

And again, as it is now I have roughly seventy information providers which will in part be made available through above hinted forum, should it appear.

And if you didn't already read it between the lines: This functionality will give you the opportunity to add your own trackers. And more...


Until next time... :)

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