December 26, 2007
@ 05:22 PM

The new version of RSS Bandit is now available. This release fixes a bug that causes the application to repeatedly request favicons from a feed's website in a manner that eventually resembles a denial of service attack. The new feature in this release is the [Top Stories] button.

The rationale for the new feature is given in Omar Shahine's blog post entitled Google Reader needs Mute. Omar wrote

Here is a feature that Google Reader needs: Mute.

Why, Cause subscribing to a lot of tech bloggers, a-list folks, and news outlets is extremely annoying when they write about the same thing. You get tired of seeing dozens or hundreds of posts about Kindle, Facebook, ThinkSecret and on and on.

These days I feel like my blogging info is like the local news (which I stopped watching some time back in high school).

So, please google, let me mute or mark read all feed items on a certain topic as read and save me the hassle of suffering through the repetition and pain.

The Top Stories feature is meant to target exactly this scenario. When you click on it, you get a list of the most recently popular items among your subscriptions. From there you can hit "Mark Items as Read" and mark all of the linking posts as read once you've gotten the gist of the story.

We don't have a Mute option where all posts that link to a story are automatically marked as read or deleted after being downloaded. This seems like overkill to me but would love to get some feedback from our users if this would be a desirable feature.

Translations
This release is available in the following languages; English, German, Polish, French, Simplified Chinese, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, Dutch, Italian, Serbian and Bulgarian.

Installer
Download the installer from RssBandit1.6.0.0a_Installer.zip . A snapshot of the source code will be available later in the week as a source code release.

New Features

  • Top Stories button shows the ten most recently popular links in your subscriptions.
  • Twitter plugin enables posting tweets about news stories or responding to tweets in an RSS feed.

Major Bug Fixes

  • Del.ico.us plugin silently fails when posting items with tags containing special characters like '#' or '+'
  • Downloading feed list from NewsGator Online deletes local machine and intranet feeds
  • KeyNotFoundException if "Mark All Items as Read" clicked shortly after changing the URL for a subscribed feed.
  • 100% CPU used when an RSS feed with no <channel> element is encountered.
  • Downloading favicons happens several times while the application is running instead of just once.
  • The "Check for updates" feature would sometimes result in the application crashing.

 

Wednesday, 26 December 2007 19:00:02 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Wow, the "top stories" features rocks!!
Thursday, 27 December 2007 01:04:16 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Hi,

I run RSS Bandit 1.6.0.0 on 64-bit Windows Vista. I have a problem that RSS Bandit always uses 64-bit version of Internet Explorer, that cannot display Adobe Flash (Adobe has not yet released a 64bit IE plugin). Many sites use flash (e.g. for video) and it is really inconvenient and annoying for error messages to pop up or add-on installer trying to install but failing each time.

Is there any way to set RSS Bandit to use 32-bit version of Internet Explorer on 64-bit Windows Vista?

I've tried setting the system's path variables to contain the following path at the beginning:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer
but it won't work.

I really like RSS Bandit, it is my favourite RSS reader and i've been using it for a long time on Windows XP, but now I have switched to Windows Vista x64, and I have this problems. Please help.
Zaphod
Saturday, 29 December 2007 02:06:34 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I too had the problem on Vista64. I think the issue is the program has been compiled with AnyCPU.

I managed to fix it using corflags.exe (which I assume is is part of the .Net SDK, not sure if its included in the runtime)

To fix I did the following (standard disclaimers apply, only do this if you're confident in what you are doing and don't blame me if it all goes wrong)

Close Rss bandit

Open a command prompt as administrator

cd to the install folder for rssbandit (default is c:\program files (x86)\RssBandit)

Backup the original rssbandit.exe (copy rssbandit.exe rssbanditsafe.exe)

Then run
corflags /32BIT+ RssBandit.exe

Then reload rss bandit and all should be well and flash should be working again.
Laurie
Sunday, 30 December 2007 12:12:26 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Hi,
i find that the 1.6.0 release is consuming a lot of ram:
under vista32 before after hours of backgroung running, it was about 175mb to 200Mb used, now after 1 to 3 hours it's up to 450mb !
best regards
happy new year
anonymous
Monday, 31 December 2007 00:25:17 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Laurie: Thanks for your solution! It worked for me.
Zaphod
Thursday, 03 January 2008 17:14:06 (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Hi,
I use RSSBandit in the portable configuration. With the new release I'd like to find out the config changes for a couple of items.

1) APPDATA\RssBandit\searches folder.
2) APPDATA\RssBandit\top-stories.xml file.

Thanks and a Happy New Year!
anonymous
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