Special thanks to: Simon Fell, Eric Vitiello Jr., Ziv Caspi, Ingve Voremstrand, Tim Danner, and everybody that has submitted bug reports and enhancement requests.

Aggie RC5 Changes

Improvements in Feed Retrieval

HTTP Compression

Added support for HTTP compression. [Simon Fell]

RssHarvest

Aggie can now be taught how to transform any structured web page into an RSS feed. This is useful for sites that produce content in an orderly fashion, but publish no RSS feeds of their own (such as MSDN). See here for details [Ziv Caspi]

XSLT transformation of XML documents into RSS feeds

Aggie can also directly transform XML content into RSS feeds if you provide it with a proper XSLT transform. To subscribe to a feed whose URL is xmlurl and whose transform into RSS is xslurl, use the following URL: xslt:?xmlfile=xmlurl&xslfile=xslurl&title=feedTitle. [Ziv Caspi]

Improved Output

Output Items as SMTP Messages

Optionally, Aggie can send SMTP mail messages to your Email account. You can have each new item in its own message, all new items in a given feed in a single message, or all new items in a given feed with the same title in a single message. See here for details. [Tim Danner, Ziv Caspi]

Improved RSS Parsing and Vocabulary

Robust and extensible RSS parser

The RSS parser has been completely rewritten. It is now very robust, will let you know if the feed is not stricly XML but will still parse non-well-formed feeds (within reason). Additionally, it is extensible, so you can ask it to parse elements that it does not know about. [Ziv Caspi]

"Shame into submission"

If the RSS parser finds a feed which is not strictly well-formed, but it still readable, it generates a detailed description of what is wrong with the feed, to help authors locate problems. [Ziv Caspi]

New RSS elements supported

In addition to title, link, and description elements, Aggie now supports Dublin Core date, encoded content, CDATA descriptions, RDF encoded content, and Trackback pings. [Ziv Caspi]

Support for base element

Aggie can now identify feeds that publish their "base", and automatically provide the proper HTML base element. This feature works only for mail output, and is most useful with RSSHarvest-ed feeds. [Ziv Caspi]

Miscellaneous

Bug fixes

Multiple bug fixes have been applies, which are too numerous to include here. [All]

Special thanks to: Simon Fell, Eric Vitiello, Ziv Caspi, Ingve Voremstrand, and everybody that has submitted bug reports and enhancement requests.

Highlights for the RC4 release

Internationalization

Aggie now has better support for international feeds.

Proxy Support

Now you can use Aggie with a proxy server.

Stylesheets

Aggie supports having different stylesheets to style the resulting HTML. Each stylesheet can have it's own configuration dialog and saved parameters. Here is a detailed explaination of how this system works. How Templates Work In Aggie.

Speed Improvements

There have been many improvements that help Aggie get the news faster. There is now support for the "If-Modified-Since" HTTP header, meaning Aggie will only download a file if it has changed since the last time it was retrieved. Also the HTTP Redirection header is obeyed and stored to reduce the number of round trips retrieving files. In addition all this information is stored in a seperate file so that if you are using Aggie to read an OPML file from a remote site you still get all the speed enhancements.

Command-Line

Aggie now ships with a command line version of Aggie that can be used in background tasks.

Referer Logs

Aggie now supports placing a link back to the users website in the referer logs. The genesis and explaination of this idea is documented on Content Syndication with XML and RSS. The page that the referer log entry points to is here (using bitworking.org as the example site) http://bitworking.org/AggieReferrers.html?userWeblog=http://bitworking.org