A few months ago I announced the creation of a downloads section on this website. Located at http://wololo.net/downloads, this is “yet another” homebrew database. My goal was to put some emphasis on versions with this database (so that people are always sure that they are looking at the latest version of a given homebrew) and it basically works, although I can’t keep up with the amount of homebrews that get released every day in the world.

But I finally stopped procrastinating and updated the /Downloads site, with 2 major improvements.

First, it is now possible for everyone to add homebrews directly to the database, making the site much more community driven, which is what I wanted from the start (but never found the time to do). No login is required (this might change in the future?) and because of that I’m still manually approving each entry, but basically if you submit a homebrew, it should take less than a few days before your entry gets reviewed. Long story short, you can go to /Downloads and click on the link Enter new Game/App in the menu on the right. If you want details, you can read the full explanation on how to add new games, new versions, new download links here.

Second, we created a nice little plugin on our /talk forum, that finds homebrew names in people’s posts, and automatically add a link to download the homebrew, as well as information about it. The plugin is really cool, and focuses on the most popular homebrews, as well as homebrews that do not get enough ratings, in order to help people find a download link quickly, but also promote the discovery of unknown homebrews.

This is cool and automated, but it will become even better with time: if there’s a homebrew you like or you dislike, rate it! it takes 1 second, and again, no login is required. This will progressively improve the plugin’s list of homebrews.

And to add to the fun, that plugin can be used from external websites too, so, if you own a site or a forum, you can simply add this plugin to your pages by adding the two following lines, just before the closing “</body>” tag of your page:

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<script type="text/javascript" src="http://wololo.net/talk/hblist.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://wololo.net/talk/downloads.js"></script>

(Alternatively you can copy those two files directly on your server rather than loading them from mine) For more details on adding this plugin to your site, go and check this thread

I’ll keep adding homebrews to the database of course, but if your homebrew is not listed, feel free to add it!

I hope you’ll like these improvements!