Introducing Joe: Automatic & continuous scan of web for interesting sf links

This post is a bit odd compared to the kind of things I normally write. But may be useful for some.

Joe is a bot (a kind of server-hosted software) that automatically & continuously scans a growing list of sites & search engine query results to locate interesting sf links (in various categories) as they appear on the web. Collected links are delivered via this feed.

Note this is still an early test version. Try if you feel brave.

Skip the rest of background below if you don't have geeky tastes.

Joe grew out of Jr, the bot that gathers links for populating the external links sections in the left bar.

Joe currently delivers far fewer links than it finds. That's because it directly uses most code of Jr - where the constraint is to give fair representation to all watched sites. It will begin delivering many more links as I split the code. But that's a while away - till Jr stabilizes.

Joe does sometimes have an idea that a particular link is likely to be far more interesting than others - at least so far my own opinion of the source & author goes. For the moment, it doesn't rate anything; I do hope to highlight these links in some way in the days ahead. It quietly drops links it doesn't think are interesting - but this is still a weak filter, & hopefully will grow stronger.

Joe is interested in science fiction alone, & not in fantasy or horror. While the links relating to later two do show up, they will start getting dropped or at least tagged in some way as the filters grow stronger.