Two new/niche tools for following VN TL updates

This post is mainly for people who are interested in tracking VN translation updates. We’ve got two new features rolling out which may interest you. They’re a little niche, but if you’re interested in keeping up on the TL projects, they’re right up your alley.

1. VN Translation Updates Aggregator

We’ve built a little tool called “VNTL-Moon“. It’s a feed aggregator, and it pulls updates from as many TL projects as we can find. We’ve got 53 on there as of the writing of this post, but I know we’ve missed some and we haven’t yet added any of the MangaGamer, JAST or Sekai VNs.

One other cool feature: I went in and customized the sidebar project links so they’ll point directly to a project’s updates/progress page. Hopefully this’ll make it even easier to track your favorite projects (Example of workflow: Go to http://moon.fuwanovel.net > Click on Project Name > Boom! You’re at the progress page. Updates!).

The VNTL-Moon logo was made by Helvetica Standard (it’s awesome — thank you!), and Nayleen set up the base software and helped me troubleshoot/customize it (tldr: Nay makes it happen™).

Recap: How you might use this tool:

• Visit it periodically to catch up on VN TL project updates
• Use it to quickly navigate (or get the link to) a specific project’s progress page (just click the name of the project)
• Look up old updates quickly
• It’ll help me do this ↓

 2. Original, weekly VN TL update posts for the next 4 weeks (possibly longer)

As part of my interest in rebooting/overhauling the VNTLS concept, I wanted to know how much time and effort it would take to write weekly visual novel translation update posts similar to the VNTS posts on /jp/ which Zaka has been using for his own weekly recap. Thanks to the VNTL-Moon tool, I’m able to pump them out in ~half an hour. Thus: I plan on writing original VN TL updates every week for the next 4 weeks as an experiment, then possibly continuing on for forever. And ever.

Why I’m trying this and how it relates to the VNTLS concept: if the time and effort required to do this is manageable, we can create a standardized format for our updates and then create advanced scrapers to handle updates to a theoretical VN TL updates site.

In addition to the weekly posts, we’ve got a kinda crappily-designed but usable static page with the TL status of each project + useful links. We’ll update that each week, too.

Recap:  How you might use these posts/the static page:

• Read them just like you read Zaka’s recaps
• If we end up doing this each week and standardize the format, we could make/collaborate on a scraper which would benefit everybody
• It may be used to automate a VN TL updates site in the future

I warned you that these tools are somewhat slanted towards the crowd who follow TL updates, but hopefully they’ll be useful to some. I’d love to get feedback from interested parties.

Links to tools:

Updates Aggregator: VNTL-Moon
Fuwazette: Static Page of TL Updates
Fuwazette: (Upcoming, weekly VNTL-esque posts)