Awasu 2.2.1.alpha2

IMPORTANT: This is an alpha release (what's this?). Some features are not complete and you will find bugs!

You must be already running 2.2.1.alpha1.

To install:

• Read the release notes below first!
  
  
• Backup your Awasu installation directory and keep it, even if the alpha appears to work correctly.
  
  
• Unpack one (!) of the following zips on top of your existing installation:

  Personal Edition	NT/2K/XP	98/Me
  Advanced Edition	NT/2K/XP
  Professional Edition	NT/2K/XP

  
  
• Run ArchiveMaintenance.exe (in the Awasu installation directory) to upgrade your databases. It is recommended that you also optimize the database after the upgrade has finished.
  NOTE: This will take some time to run. As a guide, a 180Mb ARCHIVE.DB file with 80,000 items across 309 channels took around 10 minutes to upgrade on a 1.6 P4M with 2Gb of RAM and a 7200rpm disk. The optimization took an additional 3 minutes.
  
  
• Awasu needs to update all channels so if you have a lot of them, it might be an idea to let it run overnight to do this.

Atom 1.0

And now we have a syndication format that lets publishers unambiguously identify content as plain-text or HTML, the rest of Awasu has been updated to recognize this correctly. In particular, the channel summary pages and reports now show the correct thing for Atom 1.0 content, and do much better for RSS content where it is ambiguous what anything actually is :-(

Templates and metadata

Secondly, new template tags have also been added to allow content to be conditionally included in the output. This means less reliance on Awasu to generate certain bits of HTML content since it can now be dynamically included in the template file.

All the template files have been rewritten to take advantage of these new features. If you have written your own templates, the old tags are still supported but deprecated and will be removed in a later release.

Full details are here:

• Template basics
• Template parameter reference
• Metadata reference

Other changes and bug fixes

• Upgraded the appearance of the notification balloons.
• Added more visual styles.
• Search channels now specify how far back to search.
• Switched to using the new feed icon.
• Fixed a crash when changing the My Channels channel filter.
• Modified the RSS parser to recognize the <category> tag.
• Animate the system tray icon correctly when new items are received but notification balloons have been disabled globally.
• Fixed a bug where notification balloons where being shown on the first pass of channel updates even though they had been disabled.
• Update the Activity Log when downloading content for offline reading.
• Feed items are now marked as read if the offline copy is read.
• Removed the option to listen on local ports for channel subscription requests.
• Correctly sync the list of domains that offline images can be downloaded from.
• Fixed a bug where leading characters in channel/item metadata could sometimes get lost.
• Tidied up the way channel/item titles are stored in the archive database.
• Show better feedback in ArchiveMaintenance when upgrading the databases or rebuilding the search index.
• ArchiveMaintenance now correctly detects if an upgrade failed.
• Fixed an occasional crash when serving offline content.
• Channel images are now managed using the offline content infrastructure.
  Cached copies of the channel images are no longer stored in the Channels sub-directory. If you like to be tidy, these can be safely deleted.
• The last received channel metadata is now loaded from the archive database during startup instead of being saved in the .CHANNEL files.
• Fixed a bug in the Atom 0.3 parser that was preventing it from sometimes detecting a ContentConstruct's type attribute.
• Abandon downloading offline content if the network connection goes away during the process.
• Only auto-download related links that have a rel-type of 'enclosure'.
• Fixed several occurences of "Extract" (in reference to feed items) to read "Excerpt".
• Fixed problems with window positioning at startup when running as a system tray app.
• Enabled smart docking for the Tasks Pane.

Known issues

• Due to changes in the way feed items are parsed, most of your existing items will be flagged as having new revisions.
• Channels that specify an image may not show them in their channel summary page (due to zero width and height attributes in the <img> tag. This has been already fixed for alpha3.