The HTML-read version is done.  You can optionally have Slashalert load info from the main Slashdot page.  The up side of this is no lag.  At its fasting setting, a new article will be up for no more than about 60 seconds before Slashalert will know about it.

***WARNING***  While I've had this running a few days on my machines and it seems to be working, if Slashdot makes changes to their HTML (which they will do), this may break in odd and interesting ways. If you change to this mode and it starts to act funky, then switch back to XML.  Also, the amount of detail is limited to the Title.  I can get the other info, but I rather not be dependent on the format of the HTML overly much (right now I'm able to do a search for 4 strings to get each article.

CowboyNeal pointed me to a better feed source (The XML instead of the RDF).  It's got a lot more info (author, time posted, category, etc.), so I'm now loading from that.  I also found out both the RDF and XML have a lag of one hour.  This is OK I guess, but I may be writing a hack to load info from the HTML page.  I rather NOT have to do this, as it's a bigger download and a pain to parse, but that seems to be the only way to get up to the minute info.  If I end up doing the HTML version, it will be optional (the default will be the XML).

The new version is up and will load the XML.

Finished it up this evening.  The beta is up and available.  It's pretty much done at this point.  I'll be testing it on my machines for the next week, then doing a wider release.

If you have problems, please mail the log (System Menu->View Log) to Slashalert@ratajik.net

Came up with this idea last night, slammed out most of the code this evening.  It's 100% working, just need to clean it up (Registry settings, sound select, and install).  Should be up by next week.