Newsgator v0.8 Released!
January 28th, 2003 by gregr
Another huge release, this one pretty much feature complete for v1. You can read the release notes on the download site, but here’s a couple of things to wet your appetite:
- Added “NewsPage” HTML view of news:
- Added Internet Explorer context menu to right-click on RSS link and add to NewsGator:
- Can now adjust retrieval performance vs. resources used; average retrieval performance now drastically faster:
- Now supports using IE proxy settings, and proxy credentials
- Added automatic .NET Framework installation to installer
And a whole host of other items as well. Go take a look!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 28th, 2003 at 6:34 pm and is filed under newsgator. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 28th, 2003 at 9:11 pm
Cool tool! One more tiny suggestion - what about to use a default IE font for generating individual HTML messages?
January 28th, 2003 at 10:50 pm
Why is it trying to install dotnetfx if the .NET framework is already installed? In this case, a Windows Server build.
January 28th, 2003 at 11:35 pm
Hmm…interesting. Adam, you’re the second person to have the problem with the .NET installation. Can you send me your system configuration (OS and service pack, .NET version and service pack)? Also, if anyone else is having any installation problems at all, please send me a note. Thanks!
January 29th, 2003 at 12:01 am
I had the same problem as Adam.
XP (SP1), .NET Framework 1.1
January 29th, 2003 at 8:25 am
It gets better everytime I upgrade it!
Just a word of note however, when collecting news when your viewing the homepage, the homepage does not update itself, you need to browse to another folder and then back for it to update.
January 29th, 2003 at 9:28 am
Looks GREAT!
Still have a feature request: a way to change the referer link that it uses. My log stats are now completely out of whack (I get hundreds of hits from newsgator, and no idea where they’re from).
This is, useful of course, to us who are obsessed with our log files :)
January 29th, 2003 at 9:30 am
Great job, Greg. How go the plans to “eventually integrate posting capability (via Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, RestLog API, or others)”?
January 29th, 2003 at 9:31 am
To those having the .NET installation problem - please include the version of MSI.DLL you have. It is usually under \windows\system32 or \winnt\system32.
Just right-click on MSI.DLL, properties, version. If it’s not in that directory, just do a file search. Thanks!
January 29th, 2003 at 9:33 am
Steve, the referrer thing is still on the list. I couldn’t decide how I wanted it to work yet, so it didn’t make it into 0.8.
Erik, the plans are good :-), but the implementation is thus far non-existent. I doubt if this will go into v1. It’s definitely high on the list of future enhancements, though.
January 29th, 2003 at 10:00 am
Another feature request: Changing the path of where you want a blog located is a little clunky at the moment, could really do with a folder browser dialog like you use for choosing the root folder.
January 29th, 2003 at 10:13 am
Maybe a wish list?
Can we put the date in outlook equal too the time posted in the blog and secondly can we make the ‘From’ be who posted it with display name & email-address? Last including a URL to where comments go would be nice.
I’ve only looked at RSS 2.0 spec so I’m not sure if that is possible with older versions of RSS.
That said - dude - I’m addicted! Keep up the incredibly AWSOME work!
January 29th, 2003 at 10:15 am
Odd bug - a second ‘Sam Ruby’ folder got created this morning for two posts.
January 29th, 2003 at 10:17 am
Paul, for the date, there actually is a user-defined column called “Publish Date” that you can add to your view, which is the date/time information from the RSS feed, if available. As for the “From” column, that’s a little tougher, since not all RSS feeds contain author information. It’s on the list, but I haven’t come up with a good compromise yet for displaying it.
January 29th, 2003 at 10:19 am
On the “Sam Ruby” folder thing, this happens if you upgraded from 0.7. Your old folder has trailing spaces in the name, and the new one does not (they are explicitly removed, or else the NewsPage doesn’t work correctly). Just remove the old folder, and you should be good to go.
January 29th, 2003 at 10:39 am
There is now a new installer on the download site, which you can use if you already have the .NET Framework installed…[more]
January 29th, 2003 at 11:20 am
I am getting a script error whenever I try to load the RSS page. Says the error is in Line 57, Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
January 29th, 2003 at 11:33 am
I am using Outlook together with exchange. My Outlook is in offline mode all the time since I only have a slow line to my exchange server. I configured everything so that Outlook synchronises with Exchange every 15 Minutes. As far as I can tell this is the only workable solution with a slow line to my Exchange server. NOW, here is the problem with NewsGator: It doesn’t check for updates if I am in the offline mode… Could you integrate settings how often it should search for new items seperatlely for online and offline mode, like one can do in Outlook for mails. Otherwise: Great, cool software!!!
January 29th, 2003 at 11:46 am
Frank, I have contacted you offline.
David, that’s a good point! I have put it on the list.
January 29th, 2003 at 11:06 pm
The IE proxy stuff doesn’t seem complete. It doesn’t seem to do the nifty thing IE does where it chooses a proxy based on the current connection e.g. lan, specific ras connection, etc.
No idea how easy/hard this is.
January 29th, 2003 at 11:06 pm
The IE proxy stuff doesn’t seem complete. It doesn’t seem to do the nifty thing IE does where it chooses a proxy based on the current connection e.g. lan, specific ras connection, etc.
No idea how easy/hard this is.
January 29th, 2003 at 11:08 pm
sorry about the duplicate comments. Anyway, when i added this feed
http://dotnetweblogs.com/sgentile/Rss.aspx
newsgator seemed to get stuck on it. This version seems more prone to a state in which you ask for new news, the status stuff doesn’t update and you begin to doubt whether newsgator is still working and in fact it may not be. This may have been a problem before but i wasn’t futzing with parameters as much.
January 29th, 2003 at 11:47 pm
Yeah, it seems the default IE proxy settings don’t completely extend to the dial-up settings; kind of unfortunate. Not sure what will be done about this one.
On the issue with Sam’s feed, I’ve also had some issues with this feed throughout the day today, but also with his site. I think there’s just some issues going on while he gets his site up and running. Other feeds are working fine in general; occasionally a connection can’t be made, but in every case so far that I have found it hasn’t been a NewsGator problem, but rather a network (internet) or host issue.
January 29th, 2003 at 11:49 pm
Incidentally, anyone who originally had a problem with the unexpected .NET installation, please send me a note with your configuration (OS and service pack, and .NET framework version and service pack) if you haven’t already. Thanks!
January 30th, 2003 at 8:20 am
Even if there is a problem with Sam’s new feed today, which there obviously is, I think there’s still a NewsGator issue involved. It seems to get stuck on this broken feed — it never times out, and neither the cancel button in the status dialog or in the tray menu will stop it.
January 30th, 2003 at 8:26 am
Hmm, interesting. I haven’t ever seen a problem where a retrieve wouldn’t timeout a feed correctly. Jeff, I’ll send you a note offline to get some details.
January 30th, 2003 at 10:09 am
sorry about the duplicate comments. Anyway, when i added this feed
http://dotnetweblogs.com/sgentile/Rss.aspx
newsgator seemed to get stuck on it. This version seems more prone to a state in which you ask for new news, the status stuff doesn’t update and you begin to doubt whether newsgator is still working and in fact it may not be. This may have been a problem before but i wasn’t futzing with parameters as much.
January 30th, 2003 at 10:21 am
There is still something fishy with this version of newsgator. The previous version ran for days without issue. This version gets lost somewhere. It was obvious this morning that it had stopped polling at some point during the night. When i fixed an underlying network problem (RAS went down), and then did a ‘get news now’…there was no indication of activity and the status dialog was not updated with any attempts to do anything.
relative to previous bug. Windows Server RC2 containing build 1.1.4322.535 of the framework.
January 30th, 2003 at 11:09 am
more data. It looks like newsgator is working properly when outlook starts but not subsequently. Future polling doesn’t take place and forced polling produces no receive progress at all.
January 30th, 2003 at 11:13 am
Ok…I have a version that fixes a problem where in certain circumstances, polling will not take place and the Get News button doesn’t do anything. Adam, if you send me a note I will send you a private build to try.
January 30th, 2003 at 2:30 pm
If you are having a problem where NewsGator seems to stop retrieving news…[more]
January 31st, 2003 at 10:40 am
You added that AWSOME popup menu to IE to allow us to add RSS feeds directly from the browser - but this doesn’t seem to work when reading a posting in Outlook - any plans to add that menu item to the outlook preview pane?
January 31st, 2003 at 12:44 pm
Pingback
February 2nd, 2003 at 10:40 am
Greg, NewsGator absolutely rocks. Have you thought about doing a version that sits on Exchange, and that automaticallt punts RSS feed items into public folders? I think I can set NewsGator to post to public folders (provided I have the right permissions), but that means I have to leave Outlook running on a machine. A server plug-in would be very nice indeed.
February 2nd, 2003 at 2:28 pm
Martin, glad you like it! We’ve been kicking around the Exchange Server idea…after NewsGator ships, I’ll probably try to get an idea of how many people would be interested in such a thing. Thanks!