Aggie 1.0 RC5

The latest version of Aggie is 1.0 Release Candidate 5. Full source, executable, and README are available as a download. If you are curious here is a screenshot of Aggie at work.

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

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

Installer

Now has an installation program.

Bug fixes

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