(no download required!)

There are two major problems with most Homestuck update checkers. For one, they rely on MSPA’s RSS feed, which is often a few minutes behind. The other issue is that they can slow down MSPA’s website. This website is designed in such a way that neither of these issues even exist.

Rather than having everyone access MSPA directly, this website does that on the server side, so that it only has to check MSPA once every 5 seconds, no matter how many people are using this upd8 checker. Additionally, this uses a much more reliable source to check whether there’s an update or not: the text files used to generate the MSPA pages themselves. When there’s no page, trying to access the text file will return a 404 status code. Otherwise, it will return 200. This website looks at what page will be next, and refreshes that every 5 seconds to see if the page exists yet. If it does exist, it’ll send it over to reddit, an IRC channel, and this little file to notify people of the update.