Tuesday, July 17, 2007

FeedJournal.com Status Report

A while back I decided to port FeedJournal into a web application and offer it at feedjournal.com. The decision was greatly inspired by the user community who strongly voiced their opinion about choosing the web option. I had a vote here on my blog a month ago and a very large majority voted in favor of the web. The two most important factors were:
  1. Not having to install the application locally
  2. Cross platform availability
I am happy to announce that the development is well underway and going smooth. Due to the fact that the code base is C#/.NET 2.0, my choice of technology has naturally fallen on ASP.NET 2.0 and SQL Server. As is a standard these days, I plan on including some AJAX in the interface to improve the user experience.

Users can expect a launch sometime this year. I plan to roll out features incrementally and having an early release with a basic feature set. The idea is to early on grow a strong user base who will influence FeedJournal's direction and future.

On the development side of things I am so far impressed with the development speed using ASP.NET. Together with Visual Studio and SubSonic for auto-generation of the database layer I am very satisfied with my work environment.

FeedJournal's progress will be posted here, so please sign up for the RSS feed and you will be sure to be first to know when the site will be operational for printing your own newspapers. The Windows version of FeedJournal will of course continue to be available as before.

Two major question marks at this stage are web design and hosting. I'd be happy to receive ideas from my readers to guide me in these decisions.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

New FeedJournal 2.0 Build (#184)

A new version of FeedJournal is available for download!

What's new in this version:

  • Improved installation program.
  • Improved support for Atom 1.0 feeds.

Download the build from FeedJournal's download page.

Note about Blogspot/Blogger feeds:

If you previously had issues with Blogspot's Atom feeds you should try the new build. If you are using Blogspot's new feed URLs (ending with "posts/default") please use the workaround outlined in the FAQ.