Dave Winer has a point:
I'd much rather have some news about Manila. Let's change the subject from format changes, which mean nothing to users, to features, which do.I'm sure Userland is making more money from Manila than Radio these days, focusing on Manila features and user requests makes a lot of business sense.
He also makes an interesting suggestion:
...let's get a community project going to do Atom support, and then when we're done, pass it over to UserLand.Contrary to what I've been reading, Atom support is not going to be a piece of cake: it's a medium term commitment, since the standard is fairly young and due to evolve quite a bit.
This is a typical 'open' project for a developers community, whenever the project is mature enough, it can be incorporated in Userland's code base, with very little work from their technical staff.
I would love to see ENT 1.0 topics for RSS 2.0 support in the aggregator as well. The addition of topics would improve the news browsing experience significantly. Might contribute it myself if Matt does not act first - easier for him.
Here are some pointers anyway:
If anyone shows interest, I will contribute a skeleton tool with built-in auto-update functions, as well as a webEdit server with accounts for all interested developers.
I've run into unexpected problems when readying the next 2.1.1 minor update of activeRenderer: I'm overhauling the installation / uninstallation process to go along with the newly implemented outlining styles for weblog categories, and it's an even worse nightmare than I thought it would be :-)
I should have finished the testing by Friday though, Murphy willing...
[image] [image] This week's featured publisher, Gerald Gleason, doesn't use Radio Userland to publish his weblog. He doesn't use Movable Type either. Yet, look at the navigation lighthouse that forms the left side of the page: you'll recognize a familiar outline structure, with a nautical twist :-)
[image] Gerald has put activeRenderer's javascript code to work, and produced wonderful looking 'nautical' replacements for the 'standard' outline wedges.
[image] With his authorisation, I'll soon include those picts as part of a 'nautical' style for outline wedges. Alternate sets of wedges with specific styles are scheduled to show up in the next 2.2 version of activeRenderer.
There are currently 3 mailing lists / Yahoo groups devoted to the activeRenderer Radio tool, quite a lot really :-)
I didn't realize until Monday that Gwénaël - can't think of a worst firstname to type into an HTML editor, Gwénaël :-), went through the trouble of translating all of activeRenderer's documentation into French.
Wow, that certainly took some work, I'm really grateful, and so should all French, Canadian and Belgian activeUsers. I didn't find any Swiss in activeRenderer's registration database :-)
Auf Deutsch Übersetzer herzlich willkommen... Apply within.
[image] Philip Cubeta's Wealth Bondage self styled online bordello is packed with interesting links neatly origanized in no less than 3 activeRolls.
I wish I had half of Phil's imagination and writing talent. Wealth Bondage is currently the number 2 source of referrals to the activeRenderer site. I apologize to all WB visitors: the techy stuff you find here must feel pretty boring :-)
This is a major release, with the beginning of our journey down the non-English publishing road, the first two steps being support for accented characters encoded with 'iso-latin-1', 'utf-8' or 'macintosh' sets, and a host of new macro parameters so that default English mentions on the HTML rendered pages may be replaced by other languages equivalents.
Next step involves the full localization of activeRenderer: Gwénaël is still working on it, it's a painstakingly long task, but I'm confident he will succeed eventually.
aR 2.1 also comes with an updated outlined aggregator view, and a host of bug corrections: to all patient bug reporters, thank you kindly.
Details are available in the ar-announce mailing list.