Quite a few things have been fixed up and added in 2.9.5.1. Following is a list: -
- The toolbar weirdness has been sorted out.
- HTML sanitization should be a tiny bit faster.
- The marking as read/unread funnies have been sorted out (Sort of. See known weirdness).
- Item ordering, when no specific ordering has been specified, has been sorted out.
- I added pretty little folder icons that properly display an open or closed folder (See screenshot below).
- I fixed up the delete functionality on the Category/Feed tree. Before the fix it refused to delete spacers, Live Bookmarks, etc.
- The Category/Feed tree is now more “spacer friendly” (See screenshot below).
- I finally added support for Live Bookmarks. I actually think that Live Bookmarks are a total waste of time, but I guess many people disagree. 2.9.5.1 will now deal with Live Bookmarks as if they are normal feeds. Live Bookmarks can also be added to the Watch List. Live Bookmarks are indicated with the same icon used by Firefox 3.0b5 (See screenshot below).
Known weirdness: -
- If a feed exists as a Wizz RSS feed AND as a Live Bookmark, marking feed items still doesn’t work as expected.
- Certain feeds don’t read correctly. Here is an example – http://feeds.feedburner.com/AbcNews_Business. I assume that this is because of a bug in the Firefox feed parsing API, and it’s pretty easy to support my assumption. Reading the feed through Wizz RSS or through Firefox produces the same result. i.e. Only the first item is read. It’s also easy to see that there are more items in the feed; just plug the example URL into IE.
- Authentication is not working. So that I don’t have to repeat myself, here is a copy and paste of a reply I sent to a feedback: -
Hi Michael,
HTTP authentication has always been handled by Firefox. Wizz RSS makes no attempt to handle any authentication at all, as this would, in my opinion, weaken the various Firefox security mechanisms.
For some-or-other reason, the automatic HTTP authentication stopped working in Firefox 3.0b5. I assume that this is related to various security limitations that have been imposed on the XMLHttpRequest object. I understand that these security limitations are temporary, while design around the security model of the XMLHttpRequest object is finalized. I assume that the problem will rectify itself when Firefox 3.0 is finally released.
Regards
Mike Kroger
You can get 2.9.5.1 here – http://blat.co.za/XPIs/wizzrss2951.xpi
<edit>
For those who are interested, I have just tested 2.9.5.1 on 3.0pre, and it seems to work just fine. Of course the “known weirdness” persists. Oh well…
</edit>
Hi Mike,
Could you help me, sorry to be a nuisance. How do you go about getting the Referral ads by google to display, and do we paste the URL into a text box. Can’t get it right. Do you mind?
Another thing I don’t know how to do is RSS. They call it Simple, but unless you know what it’s all about then it’s not simple. If you have already dealt with these questions could you point me in the right direction.
This isn’t really the right place to ask about Google referral ads, but yes, I put the AdSense code into the same text widget as the ads.
The best way to learn about RSS is just to jump in. There is really nothing mysterious about it. Install Firefox – http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ – and then install Wizz RSS News Reader – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/424 – and away you go.
Mike, thanks for the update.
It works great and is fast. The ordering issue is indeed solved too.
Here are my comments:
1. I like the improvement in showing open/close with different icons. But the color of the icons can be made better. It is too dark and at the beginning I was thinking they indicate some disabled feeds or something. the color of your previous version is great though.
2. Mark All Item as Read when I clicked in the bottom item window works great. However, if I do it from the feed window (top), it does not seem to completely mark all items as read, only some of them.
They are not critical for me. I thought I could provide some feedback. Thanks again for your great work.
Hey! I don’t draw the icons! I just steal ‘em from people who can draw
I used to use the Firefox folder icons, but Firefox no longer has an open folder… If you know what I mean?
Yeah, there are some funnies with the marking and I really don’t know how to fix it. I spent hours writing functions that would go directly to the Places database, and it worked perfectly… Until I closed Firefox. When I reopened Firefox, none of the history stuff I’d pushed directly into the Places database survived. There was something about the way that I’d inserted records that caused Firefox to purge all of them when it started. So I gave up and reverted to using the history API stuff, which as you can see, doesn’t work
There are also three other bugs that I picked up today: -
1. When reading an entire category, Live Bookmarks are being ignored.
2. Errors when reading feeds sometimes leave the Wizz RSS database in a locked state. To unlock the database requires a restart of Firefox. Big pain in the butt, but I’ve already coded a fix.
3. If you have any Live Bookmarks in the Wizz RSS tree, exporting OPML exports all of the items for the Live Bookmark, rather than the Live Bookmark itself.
I had to revert back to a previous version due to some problem I experienced with this one (2.9.5.1).
I reported the other day (see my post above) that it was working for me. But today I found that Wizz RSS Reader did not work properly and frequently. The problem is it would get into a state where it does not try to read a feed (after I clicked) The top right corner spinning circle did not spin at all. And, sometimes, after I clicked (a feed), the circle kept spinning and no items had been read. I clicked the circle and it stopped. But any attempt to read other feed resulted in the same thing. The only way to get out is to open another sidebar extension, and then re-open wizz sidebar.
I have not had any conclusion when this would happen; but it is fairly frequently. I have to revert back to older version as I depends on Wizz RSS Reader a lot.
Sorry to report this, but it could only be in my case (I upgraded from 2.9.4 to 2.9.5 to 2.9.5.1)
Again, thanks for the great work.
Yeah, it’s probably because of a locked database (See 2. in my comment above). Once the database ends up in a locked state, nothing works. Even closing the sidebar doesn’t help, but I have already coded a fix for the problem.
Same than MJ here. Do we expect a new release soon or should I downgrade?
BTW, I have a bug with the feed of RottenTomatoes http://i.rottentomatoes.com/syndication/rss/opening.xml, everytime I reload the feed, there are duplicates.
Keep up the good work.
PS: I wish there was WizzRSS for Safari
@macin – I hope to make a new version available later today.
I tried the feed at http://i.rottentomatoes.com/syndication/rss/opening.xml and it seems to work just fine for me.
I’m discovering the same issue as MJ. Today I reverted to an older version.
2.9.5.1 is not oke for me.
@macin – I discovered why you get duplicates with the Rotten Tomatoes feed: The item titles change according to the percentage of the “TomatoMeter”
Even if the URL is the same, Wizz RSS considers an item with a different title to be a different item. So you read the Rotten Tomatoes feed today and Then She Found Me has a score of 57%, and it goes into the datbase. Tomorrow you read the feed and Then She Found Me has a score of 59%, it also goes into the database.
There is good reason for Wizz RSS considering items with the same URL, but with different titles, to be different. In the case of the Rotten Tomatoes feed it doesn’t make much difference, but in some cases various news sources can publish a news item more than once, with each item having a totally different title. For those filtering the news items on a particular word, they may not get a result if only one instance of the item were kept.
Um, at some point I upgraded (or accidentaly downgraded) my Sage Too, and have lost all of my feeds! I need to go add them all again? VERY annoying.
I did succesfully install an earlier version of sage 2/too off this blog. But at some point I went and installed the one at AMO. And at some point recently, all my feeds dissappeared I do not know what happened.