Month: January 2004

FeedDemon 1.10 BETA 1 for registered customers

Published on by Nick Bradbury8 Comments

The first beta of FeedDemon 1.10 is now available to registered customers. Please note that this beta release will not work on your computer unless you’ve purchased FeedDemon 1.0.

Along with the usual bug fixes, version 1.10 includes a number of new features, including:

* Keyword search of existing news items
* Basic support for Atom 0.3 feeds
* Update all groups
* Support for the “feed URI scheme” (feed:// protocol)
* New watches may be run on existing news items

Complete details on changes in version 1.10 may be found in the release notes:

http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/readme/readme110b1.asp

The direct download link for beta 1 is below:

http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/beta/fd110b1.exe (2.41MB)

Just install this directly on top of version 1.0 and your existing settings will be retained.

As always, keep in mind that this is a beta release, so you WILL encounter bugs and usability problems. If you’re not comfortable using pre-release software, you should wait until the official release of version 1.10 before downloading it.

If you have any comments about the beta or run into any problems with it, please let me know by posting a bug report in the new feeddemon.beta.110 newsgroup, and be sure to include “Beta 1” in the subject line of your message.

NOTE TO TRANSLATORS: Due to changes in language strings, FDLANG files created for version 1.0 may not work correctly until they’re updated for version 1.10. Changes are marked with a <!-- 1.10 --> comment in the English.fdlang file.

Enjoy :)

Web standards: practice what you preach?

Published on by Nick Bradbury15 Comments

This post about web standards struck a chord wih me. Because I promote TopStyle as a tool for building standards-compliant sites, I frequently get email reporting that my own site doesn’t validate.

However, the reason it doesn’t validate is quite simple. My site uses Atomz search, and Atomz offers proprietary elements which control how a site is indexed. For example, Atomz won’t index anything wrapped in <noindex>..</noindex>. I use noindex elements on every page to skip indexing the navigation links, which causes the W3C’s validator to complain that my site isn’t valid XHTML. This inevitably leads to email from people calling me a hypocrite.

Now, I’m all for web standards. I’ve been creating sites since 1995, and I’ve learned the hard way how writing browser-specific code leads to problems down the road. However, I consider standards-compliance a goal, not a requirement. Limiting the usefulness of my site’s search feature just to make it 100% valid XHTML seems way over the top. Standards-compliance isn’t an uncomprising religion, but rather a practical business decision that must be weighed alongside the other goals of your site.

Blogging to Radio UserLand from FeedDemon

Published on by Nick Bradbury2 Comments

Chris Brody shared the following tip in our newsgroups about posting to Radio UserLand from FeedDemon:

RadioExpress allows you to post content from any web page to your blog:
http://www.newsisfree.com/blog/archives/000430.html

Once installed and configured as you want, add the following command line to
FeedDemon’s blog publishing tools:

http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/radioExpress?t=$ITEM_DESCRIPTION$&u=$ITE
M_LINK$&n=$ITEM_TITLE$

Note that I don’t use Radio UserLand, so I haven’t tried this myself.

Blogger, Atom and FeedDemon

Published on by Nick Bradbury8 Comments

Now that Blogger has announced its support for Atom, FeedDemon users may be wondering when it will be able to read these Atom feeds. So I’m happy to announce that the upcoming FeedDemon 1.10 (a free upgrade from 1.0) will include Atom support. A beta of 1.10 which includes Atom support is expected in February and will be made available to registered FeedDemon users.

As an aside, it’s curious that Blogger favors Atom over RSS given that RSS is already widely supported. Google is obviously trying to push adoption of Atom, and this move will certainly make Atom support a necessity for upcoming feed readers.

A Plethora of Web Authoring Links

Published on by Nick Bradbury2 Comments

Since I haven’t showcased many articles about CSS and xHTML here lately, here’s a plethora of web authoring links that will be of interest to TopStyle users: