Due to lack of interest, I have stopped updating the iSubway files. Lack of interest was not the only reason for iSubway’s demise however. I was, as Joel Spolsky would say, eating my own dogfood so to speak. While the information was useful, keeping it updated on my iPod was kind of a pain. The problem with this sort of information is that it looses its relevance quite quickly. Carrying around two week old subway service advisories is not all that useful. Since the information did not update automatically it tended to go unrefreshed.

I still think that it would be great to have this information available in a more accessible way. For instance, it would be nice if the MTA made this information available via RSS. If an RSS feed were available, the information would be easier to access and all kinds of great stuff could be done with it. I wrote to the MTA about this and received a speedy response basically stating “we’ll think about it.” I’m not holding my breath.

But, just in case someone from the MTA website is reading this, here are a few things that could be done if you would provide an RSS feed:

  • People could use their news aggregators to get updates
  • Other websites could easily include this information (perhaps even WAP sites)
  • Mobile devices could automatically sync this information

The latest MTA Subway Service Advisories (iSubway.zip) are available on iSubway.

I’ve spent the last fifteen minutes or so trying to figure out why Firefox insisted on “downloading” last week’s information from this site even though it did not exist on the site. I deleted it from the download manager thinking that was the problem, but it wasn’t until I cleared the cache that the right version appeared on my desktop. Perhaps each week’s iSubway file should have a unique filename to prevent this from happening.

Inspired by piPod, I created iSubway, an iPod friendly listing of MTA Subway Service Advisories. It is very basic, but functional, allowing one to carry the full list of subway service advisories with them. Service advisory updates will be posted here each Friday.

iSubway uses the notes feature on the iPod to create an easy to read, portable list of published subway advisories. Since a lot of New Yorkers seem to carry their iPod with them everywhere, this seems like a natural.

If you use it, let me know what you think.