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A comment on Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia. Parent comment

Re:Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on... by squeaky-clean on Monday April 23, 2018 @06:09PM (#16907907)
> Even if it means having to build your own backend process which polls the websites for the 20 respective OSs individually so you can compile your own API

One caveat there, a page like that for MacOS doesn't exist. Scraping Wikipedia may be insane, but it's often the best option. You can scrape macrumors or something, but then you're still just parsing a site meant to be read by humans. You also still risk those 20 OS websites changing as much as Wikipedia.

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Re:Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on... by laumars on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @01:56AM (#16910222)
Indeed but I was thinking of endpoints that have remained relatively static because they have been auto generated or a history of scraping. Some Linux distros have pages like that (even if it's just a mirror list).

But my preferred solution would be using whatever endpoint the respective platform uses for notifying their users of updates.

This strikes me as a solved problem but even if you can't find a ready to use API then I'd probably sign up to a few mailing lists, update my own endpoint manually and offer 3rd party access for a modest subscription.

Either way, scraping an encyclopedia for an English phrase to parse strikes me as the worst of all the possible solutions.

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