Nick Bradbury

Important note to FeedDemon translators concerning RC3

As much as I hate making changes this late in the game, I've decided that I really need to modify how languages are added to FeedDemon. These changes are necessary in order to simplify installing new languages, both for end users and for translators (not to mention myself!).

Starting with RC3 (coming next week), all displayed strings will be contained in one XML file per language rather than three, and each language file will be stored directly in the Data\Lang folder rather than in a subfolder of it. FeedDemon language files will be named after their language, with the extension .FDLANG (ex: English.fdlang, Spanish.fdlang, etc.).

If you've translated FeedDemon into another language, you can simply copy the text from the three older files (const.xml, dialogs.xml and forms.xml) and paste them into your new FDLANG file.

Note that several strings have changed in RC3, so additional translating will be necessary after creating your FDLANG. To help with this, I've uploaded my English language file for RC3. Each new/modified/deleted string has been marked in this file with an "RC3" comment, so simply search for "RC3" to locate changes.

If anyone would like to create an FDLANG prior to the release of RC3, let me know by posting a comment here once the translation is completed, and in your post please state whether I have your permission to include your FDLANG with the RC3 install.

BTW, be sure to save your FDLANG as UTF-8 if you use accented characters - otherwise, the accents may not appear in FeedDemon's UI!

Lockergnome gets a face-lift

Looks like Lockergnome has had a big make-over, and their new design relies on CSS and XHTML (via Christopher Owens).

Why table for layouts is stupid

Bill Merikallio and Adam Pratt provide a wonderfully-illustrated explanation of why using tables for layout is stupid (via Web-Graphics).

W3C Urges Invalidation of Eolas Patent

Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C come to the rescue and provide proof of prior art on the Eolas patent (via WebStandards.org).

FeedDemon RC2 Localizations

My thanks to everyone who took the time to create localized language files for FeedDemon 1.0 RC2:

• Chinese translation by Jedi
• German translation #1 by Stefan Walter
• German translation #2 by Thomas Stich
• Hungarian translation by Jozsef Tamas Herczeg
• Japanese translation by Hiroshi Okugawa
• Polish translation by Jakub Kazecki
• Romanian translation by Andrei Besleaga
• Spanish and Galician translations by Martín Fernández

If you download a ZIP file from any of the above links, they should be unzipped into a subfolder of FeedDemon's Data\Lang folder. To change the language used by FeedDemon, simply go to the first page in FeedDemon's options (F8) and choose the desired user interface language.

Note:I've enabled comments for this post so that others can point out additional translations, but please don't use the comments for bug reports or other FeedDemon-related questions. Questions about FeedDemon should be posted in the FeedDemon beta newsgroup instead.

FeedDemon 1.0 RC2

FeedDemon 1.0 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) is now available. Be sure to read the release notes before upgrading from a previous release.

As always, comments and bug reports should be posted in the feeddemon.beta newsgroup. When posting to the newsgroup, please be sure to include FD1.0RC2 in the subject line.

Posting to TypePad from FeedDemon

Glenn Slaven describes how to post to TypePad from FeedDemon. Great tip, Glenn!

Posting to MovableType from FeedDemon

Jakub Kazecki posted a handy tip in our newsgroups which enables posting to MovableType directly from FeedDemon.

First, select Tools > Blog this News Item > Configure Blog Publishing Tools, then click the "Add" button and enter this as the command line:

http://www.myblog.com/cgi-bin/mt.cgi?
is_bm=1&bm_show=&__mode=view&_type=entry
&title=$ITEM_TITLE$
&link_title=$ITEM_TITLE$&link_href=$ITEM_LINK$
&text=$ITEM_DESCRIPTION$

Where 'www.myblog.com/cgi-bin' is the URL of your MT installation.

After doing this, you'll be able to right click on a news item and select "Blog This News Item" to post to your MovableType blog directly from FeedDemon.

Optimizing your RSS feed for FeedDemon

Recently I've had several people ask me how they can optimize their RSS feed for use with FeedDemon. Given that FeedDemon doesn't use any proprietary elements, my recommendations below will help optimize your feed for use with pretty much any RSS aggregator.

1. Include each item's publication date, either with <pubDate> or with <dc:date>. A large number of feeds don't include the publication date of each news item, which means that FeedDemon can only show when an item was received (downloaded).
2. Use a short, descriptive <title> for each news item. If you don't have useful titles, readers may not know whether they want to read what you have to say.
3. Don't skip the <description>. Some feeds contain only titles, forcing people to visit their sites if they want to read an item. This also hampers offline reading, which is a major annoyance for some people.


4. Avoid excessive HTML formatting in your descriptions. If you want people to see your design skills, point them to your site rather than unnecessarily bloating your RSS feed.

Macromedia buys eHelp

Macromedia has acquired eHelp, a company specializing in help authoring and demonstration software. Details about the acquisition are on Macromedia's site.