Software Development category

While I have been working on Now. I realised a problem that I haven’t really seen discussed before, probably because others haven’t really seen it as a problem.

What am I talking about? How we view RSS feeds in RSS readers.
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Sometimes after an initial release of a program my mind still buzzes with things that I can add to it. Well, it has happened again. After releasing Now. the other day and playing around with real feeds I noticed that it could be made better. Now. 1.1 was started, and here’s the new:

• Atom feed support (uses MagpieRSS now).
• OPML feed import (very handy when migrating your feed list from a real program over to Now.)
• Edit feed properties.
• Options pane.

And the improved:

• Better handling of feeds with no title text.
• Fall-back for when feeds don’t provide handy date/times.
• Gets feed names from the feed itself.
• Most settings in config.php now reside in the database. Config.php still requires editing for the database settings though.
• Automatic cache handling.

It should be easy to upgrade. If you already have Now. 1.0, you’ll get notified of updates through the welcome page. Anything else people want fixed?

I thought I would release my online RSS reader now. But unfortunately I realised that the name I gave it is a registered trademark and hence shouldn’t be used unless I want lawsuits against me. So it is back to the drawing board, sorry folks!

Plus it is great.

Where the hell am I? Oh, right. It was another night where I didn’t get to bed until 2am and had to wake between 8 and 9 in the morning. So now I’m quite shattered. Unfortunately I’m quite “awake,” if you know what I mean, and hence probably won’t sleep. But that won’t help because I have a meeting at 2pm and a movie to go see.

So, what was this assignment. It involved Visual Basic .net, and it hurt all of us. We had to link to a database and edit results and stuff. Visual Basic is one screwed up language. We had finished by 12 midnight, but then had to go on to try and link the real database in the program. This took another hour and three quarters. The computers were incredibly slow for some reason.

Now to get on with my ethics essay…