AdaCore gems are harder to find and navigate

Correct me if I’m wrong but it seems that AdaCores new website has lost the gem indexing and the links on the page below are broken. We can always use Google to search or the sites search but it does seem to be a regression.

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I agree. I’m using the web archive to scroll it now. The search function contained therein is absolute crap. I don’t want to read about random blogs. I want to read the gem page! Gave up and went to webarchive after 4 mins.

They’ve also lost the RSS page on the last blog upgrade. Now the feed is frozen in https://ada-planet.blogspot.com/

As far as I know they’ve been folded into the blog system, and are indexed there

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Right, you can use the search box to find gems quickly, e.g. Commercial software solutions for Ada, C and C++ | AdaCore

The new website has no RSS feed, and there is no plan to bring it back at this point. You can follow AdaCore’s posts on Linked-in.

Why on earth adding a dependency on such external service instead of the simple and open nature of rss feeds? (Note: I don’t use linkedin and rarely read Adacore blog posts, so it’s just out of curiosity).

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I don’t know if feedback would be considered useful or not, but if it is: Using the search to find gems is a bit more onerous than before. For some of the series, related gems are not always next to each other, so having the results of the search break up into pages of 12 results each (and each with a rather large graphic) makes scanning for the gem you after somewhat more difficult. I really appreciated the old one page list of titles and links that I could just scroll down and scan really quickly.

Please don’t take that as criticism, it’s not meant to be overly negative or anything.

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And they’re anonymous! They deleted the authors.

I observe that the AdaCore website and blog provides the modern corporate slop aesthetics and ergonomics (“negative experience is a feature”).
Therefore, my guess is that it does not support RSS.

The ACM Digital Library has almost all the Gems in PDF format with proper attribution and in open access.
The trouble is getting them - they are spread across multiple archival SIGAda editions.

I wrote to ACM asking if those could be re-published into a repository for everyone’s content.

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Pending that, what the Ada community could do is to build an index webpage, with for each entry the title of a gem and the direct URL to access the corresponding page in the PDF of the proper Ada Letters issue.

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100%

So many of the Ada Gems are truly gems! Search precludes the serendipity of “Wow, that title looks neat!” followed by a deep dive into some cool technique or feature I knew nothing about before.

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… and some time later, after yet another “awfully needed and highly demanded” server update, links will go dead …

Web pages updates are like facelifting operations Hollywood actors undergo. :smiling_face_with_tear: I miss the time of hard copies and CD’s.

I am yet to receive any response from ACM Digital Library.
Meanwhile, I just made the index myself utilising LLM help.

It’s a single Markdown file.

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That’s great! I don’t know if it helps with missing data, but the wayback machine shows some of the missing authors: Ada Gem Archive

original wayback machine search results

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Good find.
I added the delta to the index.

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The improved index is now available at: Gems | ada-lang.io, an Ada community site

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I took some time to fetch all the pdf (make them when necessary) and build a single file archive with the proper bookmarks, to search in them easily. I often find it easier like this, as long as said file doesn’t grow too much.

Archive

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It compresses down to a PDF of about 12MB; if you want I can email you the processed PDF.