Software Garden ListGarden Program News

ListGarden 1.3.1 Released

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 19:33:51 GMT

The new major upgrade to ListGarden is now available, complete with documentation.

See Version 1.3 for more information.

Most users of ListGarden should find some new features that will be helpful.

As usual, please report any problems you find, either with the program or the website.

ListGarden 1.3 Beta available for test

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 18:01:45 GMT

After nearly a year of no changes, I've finally released a beta version of an upgrade to ListGarden. The program is available for testing, but there is no documentation yet other than the normal "helpful text" along with each input field and this notice. More documentation will come over the next week, I hope. I would appreciate interested users to test this version and report any bugs or other feedback (see the Contact Us page).

Here are the links for download:

Windows: www.softwaregarden.com/downloads/listgarden-1-3beta/listgardenwin.exe

ZIP source: www.softwaregarden.com/downloads/listgarden-1-3beta/listgarden-1-3beta.zip

TAR source: www.softwaregarden.com/downloads/listgarden-1-3beta/listgarden-1-3beta.tar

GZ source: www.softwaregarden.com/downloads/listgarden-1-3beta/listgarden-1-3beta.gz

There are lots of new features, including support for podcasting (including iTunes), backup, and wiki-like non-HTML text markup. The data format for feed data files is upwards compatible with the previous releases.

Use normal testing caution and make a backup copy of your data before upgrading.

Here is an overview of some of the changes:

Enclosures have been added to the list of item elements you can set, including the URL, length (in bytes), and type (e.g., audio/mpeg). The type can be automatically set using a template option value.

You can browse for enclosure information. It is assumed that you use another program (like a simple FTP program) to upload the file to be "enclosed". Intstead of filling in the enclosure URL and length by hand you can click a "Browse" button and see a list of files in a directory on the server, sorted by most recently modified. (You can browse a different server than the one where the RSS feed is uploaded to.) You can then fill in the enclosure information by pressing a "select" button.

Added a "Backup Data" feature to publishing. You can save the backup copy of the feed data file locally and/or upload it to the server along with the RSS file(s). The backup files need not be in the same directory as the other files (so they may be in places off-limits to the web server for security). For security, by default the password values in the data file are not backed up. The backup goes either repeatedly to the same file, or to multiple files with time-stamped names.

Added an "Item Additional XML" field so that you can add additional <item> elements, including the ones in RSS and those iin other namespaces, like for iTunes.

Added an "RSS Tag Additional Text" value to allow you to add text to the <rss> tag, including the namespace declaration needed for iTunes extensions.

Upgraded non-HTML mode of the item description field to create more interesting output without needing to manually entered HTML: Line breaks are preserved as <br> and there are easy ways (similar to some wikis) to add bold, italic, and linked text, as well as indented text (like this) paragraph. This entire RSS item was created using this feature (the "Includes HTML" box was not checked).

Fixed GUID creation to use months starting with 1, not 0 (this will only affect new items -- previously created GUIDs will not change).

There are a few other minor cosmetic changes.

The first documentation I plan to write will be about using this version for podcasting. When it is available, I'll add an entry here. A useful feature is the ability to automatically create a companion HTML file with a list of shows and download links for manually downloading the enclosures (for those without "podcatching" software). I've been using an early release for my Software Licensing podcast list of shows since May.

New Release: ListGarden 1.02 fixes problems, adds feature

Thu, 23 Sep 2004 20:35:32 GMT

ListGarden 1.02 has been released. It has the following changes:

New feature: A new item has been added to the Options tab. It is the "Channel Additional XML" value. This option allows you to provide text to be added to the XML that makes up the <channel> part of the feed. It is an advanced feature that should only be used by people who understand how to write XML. It is used to add elements, such as <copyright> and <image>, that are not currently supported by ListGarden.
The problem with the -d command option and pathnames that have an embedded space has been fixed. When looking for files to list, spaces in the specified datafile pathname are searched for with a wildcard (meaning it will match a space or any other character).
A problem with browsers that repeatedly look for favicon.ico files that showed up most problematically with Firefox 1.0PR has been fixed. ListGarden's built-in server now returns a 404 error for favicon. Firefox 1.0PR should now work with ListGarden.
There were slight changes to the HTML produced for the UI with respect to <script> tags.

For most users, there is no pressing need to upgrade unless you are using the latest version of Firefox or can take advantage of any of the other changes.

ListGarden's builtin server does not work with Firefox 1.0PR

Mon, 20 Sep 2004 19:48:39 GMT

The 1.0PR release of the Firefox browser makes ListGarden appear to be stuck on the first "Feed" page. This only occurs with the builtin ListGarden server (which is how it is run by most users, unfortunately), and not when running remotely using CGI serving. The behavior stems from a change in how Firefox requests favicon.ico files. Until the next release of ListGarden (hopefully in the next few days), Firefox users must either control ListGarden with another browser (e.g., Firefox 0.9x, IE, Safari), or run ListGarden using CGI and a server (like Apache).

Bug: The -d option does not work with many pathnames

Thu, 09 Sep 2004 16:39:35 GMT

The "-d" or "-datafile" option to ListGarden does not work correctly if the text given has any spaces in it (a common case, such as having "My Documents" in the path). This option is usually only used when you want the data files to be in a different directory than the program itself. Most people seem to run ListGarden without using this option.

The bug shows up when you can't find a file you have created in the list of files ListGarden shows when running ListGarden again. You can copy the file back into the directory with the program and run ListGarden again without the "-d" flag to continue without data loss.

Until there is a new version with the fix, you may need to not use this option, or find ways (such as with relative pathnames) to avoid pathnames with spaces. Contact Software Garden if this poses a problem for you.