http://caterpillar.masukomi.org/ News and updates for the Caterpillar XML Feed Reader en-us 2004-07-06T03:22:58-05:00 2004-07-06T03:23:00-05:00 I've been burning the midnight oil getting Caterpillar 3.0's documentation ready. I'm up to 50 pages now thanks in no small part to VodooPad. I'll need to run a custom perl script on the HTML it produces to improve some of the linking but even with having to write that it's saved me hours, and hours. This is a great app. Who would have thought there could be 50 pages of documentation? Given, many of the pages are only a few paragraphs long but still. I've been working hard to make it easy to navigate and find the information you want, and not have to deal with anything else. Kind of like Caterpillar itself.... http://caterpillar.masukomi.org/blog/archives/001911.html The ultimate test of any application is when the author(s) put it all on the line and start using their own stuff. Well, I've been using Caterpillar since the start, but there was this one new feature that I was hesitant to use.. Import. You see, to really test import I had to export what I had, delete everything, and import what I exported, then hope against hope that it was all still there because I didn't want to loose some of those entries I'd saved. But I made a promise when I released Caterpillar 2.0. I said, "You can save any entry permanently." And I don't think it really counts if to have permanent you have to never upgrade. So, I backed it all up, exported, wiped out the db and imported it all again, only to find an exact duplicate of what I exported. Yaaay. Export and Import... http://caterpillar.masukomi.org/blog/archives/001907.html So, when I designed Caterpillar 2.0 I wrote in a fairly simple threading model. Didn't need anything too fancy as things tended to all finish fairly quickly. Then Caterpillar 3.0 came along... which I'm still holding off on releasing because I have yet to go a week without tweaking something. I'm trying really hard not to. It was bug free.. well, all my code was bug free, there are still some minor bugs in the WYSIWYG editor that most people would probably never see. Anyway, I'm not really bug fixing so much as doing usability testing and fixing those issues. A big one came up a couple days ago. New feeds were just taking way to long to add. At least a minute, during which time the dialog was still up and you couldn't do anything else. Your average user wouldn't have hit that issue for a while but... http://caterpillar.masukomi.org/blog/archives/001898.html Still just trying to let Caterpillar 3.0 bake before release. The blogging features are working well ...everything's working well but a few small bugs have cropped, and been quickly squashed, by letting it just run 24/7. I just need more interesting feeds to subscribe to.. Know of any? On a related note. I'm doing all my blogging from Caterpillar now. It's just that much easier to use it than a web page and I always have it running. I need to add in multiple blog support. I've got the structure in place to support it I just haven't implemented it yet. I think I am going to hold off and get 3.0 out the door then just make 3.1 support multiple blogs. I figure most people only have one so it's not that big of a deal.... http://caterpillar.masukomi.org/blog/archives/001887.html Caterpillar Now supports HTTP Conditional GET. This means less load on the servers you download from. Faster feed loading for you, and less of a resource when it's checking for new entries. Just a few lines of code an everyone benefits. This feature will be available in the next release. The next release will hopefully be available in about a week. I'm fine tuning the big new feature still. ;) P.S. If you haven't filled out the poll yet please do so. Getting more input on that feature will really help as it's a lot of work and I don't want to do it if nobody is interested... http://caterpillar.masukomi.org/blog/archives/001856.html I had a brainstorm last night. A solution to the problem of feed icons. favicons! This will be available in the next release of Caterpillar (2.5). I"m amazed at how useful they are. I thought it'd be a nice thing to have but it makes picking the items you want to read that much easier. For the geekily curious the problem was that while you can specify an icon in an RSS feed the icons people use are generally huge and of such variad sizes that automatically resizing them to something useful that still looked good and was readable just wasn't realistic. But then I thought of favicons. Lots of sites have them and they're perfectly sized and made to be viewed at a ridiculously small size.... http://caterpillar.masukomi.org/blog/archives/001853.html http://caterpillar.masukomi.org/blog/archives/001851.html Imagine what would happen if your News Reader knew what you liked and let you know before you started weeding through all the new entries yourself. It will.... http://caterpillar.masukomi.org/blog/archives/001841.html Caterpillar 2.0 is now available! Checkout the features and screenshots. I'd like to give special thanks to the many open source projects upon which Caterpillar is built, to Kevin A Burton for his his Java implementation of Mark Pilgrim's feed parsing library, to Knarphie and John for their feedback on the beta versions, and to Mizzy for putting up with my blabbing about more software. I'd also like to thank anyone who takes the time to download it. If you like it please consider making a contribution so that I can afford the time to make it better for all of us.... http://caterpillar.masukomi.org/blog/archives/001834.html