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It Took Me Long Enough...

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The new and improved SimplePie 0.94 is out. Major features/changes in this version include: Better support for non-English feeds, significantly improved support for poorly written feeds, automatic deletion of outdated cache files, and the stripping-out of potentially harmful tags (as per Mark Pilgrim’s suggestions).

There’s still a smidge of fine-tuning left to do. Although I fixed a very high number of feeds in this release, I broke a small handful of others. The newly broken feeds include Forever Geek’s RSS (not Atom) feed, Asa’s notblog*, News.com, and GameSpot feeds. Out of a list of approximately 334 test feeds (374 total - 30 duplicates - 10 no longer exist), only 9 aren’t working. Not too shabby, I’d say.

I’ll probably begin working on v0.95 on Saturday. Here is a list of things I plan to do in time for the 0.95 release:

  • Finish fine-tuning the regular expressions I use for supporting bad feeds.
  • Add the ability to display images in feeds, even though the server is set to block the display of images on other sites.
  • Encode all tags used inside <code></code> tags.
  • Get speed back to v0.93 levels.
  • Improve the ability to display feed dates.
  • Improve support for relative URL’s in feeds.

Keep watching this space. Hopefully it won’t take me another month to get the new version out. Come to think of it, have you all gone and bugged Señor Paul about getting SPG 1.1 done yet? If not, you should. He might forget to work on it otherwise. *grin*

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.