Version 2.4 of the CITA RSS Aggregator
As usual, 'our' best ideas have come from feedback. Many thanks to everyone who made suggestions for improvement.
Version 2.4 provides the following improvements over version 2.3:
- We now use a stylesheet (using the CSS standard) to display channel details and weather pages. That means you can change the appearance of these pages to suit your tastes. For example, you can change:
- Fonts, font sizes and colours
- How links work - for example, you can delete the CSS entries that control the appearance of links to reinstate the default treatment provided by your browser
- Background colour and spacer colours
- If the Aggregator detects you are displaying a feed page, it displays the same orange flash at the top of the page as it does if you navigate to a page that points to a feed. Click the flash to add the feed to the Aggregator.
- The Aggregator now detects 'content:encoded' elements in feeds. These usually provide a more detailed description of the feed item than is available in the standard description element. That means you get to see more information without having to visit the feed page.
- You can now choose to see just the active downloads in the downloads window.
- The channel summary now suppresses download items if you have instructed the Aggregator to ignore them. If you want to see ignored downloads in a channel summary, right click the channel in the channel list and click 'Show all items'.
- You can now specify a download directory for each channel that overrides the general download directory.
- You can specify that you do not want to see normal alerts from a given channel. Instead, you just see newsflashes and download alerts.
- The Aggregator now remembers the location and size of the options and download windows.
- Not an enhancement as such, but we have tested the Aggregator is compatible with Internet Explorer 7.
- We have added a new command line option to the Subscriber utility. Specifying URL<feed URL> will subscribe you to the specified feed. This will allow you to use version 2.0 of FireFox (when it is released) to subscribe the Aggregator to a feed from within the FireFox window.
- We have implemented a less resource-intensive method for downloading feed pages. This eliminates temporary freezes when displaying the main Aggregator window.
- In RSS feeds the channel description is mandatory. However, the Aggregator will now successfully read feeds that have a missing channel description.
- The Aggregator tries to determine the date the feed provider last updated the feed from dates provided in the feed. If it can it shows 'Last modified by provider...' in the channel page heading. Otherwise it gets the date the feed file was last modified on the server and shows 'Last modified by server...' in the channel page heading.
- The Aggregator now works with login pages that prepopulate id and/or password fields. For example some sites display "Enter your id" or similar in the 'id' box. This data is now discarded when the Aggregator logs onto a secure feed for you.
- In maintenance release 2.3c we started decoding web page addresses provided in feeds. This had absolutely no effect on most feeds. However, it appeared that some feeds needed this step to make their addresses work correctly. Unfortunately, there are other feeds that do not work correctly if we decode their addresses. Worse, the decoded addresses can corrupt the Aggregator's settings file. We have therefore disabled address decoding by default. If you use a feed that appears to need the decoding facility, you can request this via a new 'Decode URLs' option in the channel settings window.
- We have taken further steps to minimise the impact of .NET framework bugs including bugs that:
- Cause the error message "The underlying connection was lost" (although there are still plenty of other reasons for this message to appear).
- Cause a crash with an "Overflow or underflow" message.
- We have removed the following bugs from the Aggregator:
- It no longer displays a spurious error message when you cancel a download.
- It no longer stores country-specific information in the settings file. Previously, people encountered problems when changing their PC settings from, for example, English date formats to Italian. This version of the Aggregator automatically updates the stored dates to their international format over time. You can force all the dates to be updated immediately by clicking 'Tools' and 'Update all channels now' from the main Aggregator window. You can eliminate decimal values from the settings file by opening the options window and making any change to the 'General settings' and 'Alert settings' tabs.
- We corrected a bug that caused the Aggregator to crash with 'Object reference not set to an instance of an object' when updating some feeds.
- If a web page pointed to a feed page, the Aggregator did not always interpret the feed address correctly if the page did not provide a full reference.
Click here to find out what changed between versions 2.2 and 2.3.
If you are unsure which version of the Aggregator you are using: click the Aggregator icon in your system tray to open the main window, and click 'Help', 'About RSS Aggregator'. You will see a window that shows you the Aggregator version number.
If you'd like to learn more about RSS, or if you would like to use RSS in your business, get in touch. We'd be pleased to hear from you.
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