How the Atlas reads a tool
Every card in the Atlas is a reading, not a review. A crawler reads each tool again every seven days, and the words on the card are bands over what it found, each with its source and date.
By INITE Atlas Desk
What we read, and how often
Each tool is read again every seven days: its own homepage and pricing page, then public sources - npm, PyPI and GitHub releases, public job boards and the tool's careers page, the App Store, and Wikidata for the company behind it. A figure that is not on one of those pages is not on the card.
Use
How many people use a tool: estimated visits to its site, installs from npm and PyPI, and its presence in public usage reports. The card says it in words against its shelf - the most used, among the most used, rarely used - and the shelf's order follows the same reading.
Activity
Whether anyone is still building it: the newest release, the newest dated page on the site, and open roles. A tool with none of those for months reads as quiet; one we could not read says so rather than guessing.
Price
Only what the vendor's own pricing page prints, with the date we read it and a link to it. Prices are shown in the reader's currency at that day's rate, and the original price stays beside the converted one.
Our line about the tool
The one-line description and the use cases are written by us from the tool's own site, one tool at a time, and refused when they repeat the vendor's marketing.
What never moves a place
No votes, no reviews, no paid placement. Readers' likes and notes sit beside the reading and are labelled as theirs; they never change a tool's place. An owner can claim a card and point us to the pages to read, but never writes the reading.
Corrections
Anyone can suggest a fix on any card, with the page that shows it. A person checks every suggestion before it is published, and the card says when it was corrected.
The data
Every shelf can be downloaded as a CSV file under CC BY 4.0: the same fields the cards show, with the date each was read.