Individual Machine RSS

It’s always risky to publish a blog post on April 1. Especially a serious one. And I can assure you, with the utmost sincerity, that this is a serious post. You can’t joke about RSS.

People like you could always subscribe to “machines added to locations” RSS feeds for either the entire site or for a specific region. For examples:

• https://pinballmap.com/location_machine_xrefs.rss
• https://pinballmap.com/portland/location_machine_xrefs.rss

But starting now, you can include a machine ID and have an RSS feed that shows only when that particular machine is added to locations!

For this, use this path, and include a machine ID, like these examples for Rollergames:

• https://pinballmap.com/location_machine_xrefs/machine_id/746.rss
• https://pinballmap.com/portland/location_machine_xrefs/machine_id/746.rss

But, you ask, how do I find the machine ID? There are a couple ways.

You can pull up this machines endpoint which lists over 1,480 machines in our database, including an “id” field for each one. That ID is the ID!

You can also do a machine search on the website and then look at the URL that shows up. For example, if you search for Rollergames, after the results load you’ll see that the URL has become https://pinballmap.com/map?by_machine_id=746&by_machine_name=Rollergames+(Williams%2C+1990). Examine that URL and you’ll see by_machine_id=746.

From there, you can subscribe to the feed using your favorite RSS reader client. Perhaps a limitation is that these feeds are only for one of the 12 versions that each manufacturer produces these days. But that’s ok.

Anyway, this is a cool feature, isn’t it.

This feature originated as an idea from Jakelshark on the Rollergames-themed Discord, The Pinball People, for a map alert whenever Rollergames is added to a location. You laugh, but then Wywin doubled down on this idea by offering up a $40 bounty to see it done. Pinball Map contributor, fiveNinePlusR, then put together the initial functionality, which included the ability to create the feed for any machine, and then Ryan finalized it.

Wywin was true to his word, and with the bounty donated $40 to the Oregon Humane Society on Pinball Map’s behalf! Thank you!