This is the release log for parseMe, a lightweight RSS/Atom feed reader for mobile and accessibility devices.
2007-07-27: v2.1
- Moved the CSS inline to spawn less parallel queries for faster load and display time on handheld devices (slow connections and rendering engines).
- Moved the parseMe class and processing back into one self-contained script, now that the CSS is inline and the php include was the only thing left in the now obsolete lib directory (see above).
- Now defaulting to using the PHP libcurl option to make sure parseMe can still connect to the requested feeds even when the native URL wrappers are turned off at the php.ini level (allow_url_fopen), like with some popular hosting accounts (EG: Dreamhost). Still reverting to trying file_get_contents() gracefully if libcurl is not available.
- Upgraded license to GNU GPLv3.
- Launched new web site: http://tekartist.org/labs/parseme/
- Launched new public SVN repo: http://labs.tekartist.org/parseme/svn/
2007-06-02: v2.0
- Moved my CVS repository to Subversion (svn), hence the revision number differences. I considered moving to a distributed revision control system, since they’re gaining in popularity, but I got lazy after the major rewrite.
- This is a quasi-complete code rewrite. In this release, I have moved away from the initial goal of keeping within the 500 lines limit (including comments) and having an “educational” flavour, to focus instead on the code structure, the feature set, further increased security, etc. The security aspect does account for a lot of the extra lines, when coupled with the new features.
- The parseMe class has now been subtracted from the index.php script and has been moved to lib/php/parseMe.class.php.
- One of the most significant feature, on the user end, is that you can now request any number of feeds to be parsed at once. Keeping in mind that the main target audience for this tool is the mobile market (usually slow, tiny screens, low RAM, etc), the total number of feeds offered does not lead to major performance hits, unless of course the source themselves are slow to answer the tool’s request(s). You can of course still set your feed selection in the cookie-based preferences, which now allow for multiple choices.
- With the multiple feed feature, the next logical step was to enable some sort of sorting options. You can sort the entries by feed, from new to old (descending) or old to new (ascending). Your favourite sort order can be saved.
- You can now opt in or out of using the Google Mobile gateway for destination links, right from the query form, and save your preferred choice.
- On the server end, self-contained caching is now done through PHP data serialization, since there is no point in reparsing the same XML at every page load, after all.
- There are quite a few tweaks on the security front, primarily with the concern that we do have a application-writable directory and files (cache). Since the data contained in the cache files is not very sensitive by design (and if it is, I’d suggest using ssl and password protecting the app), this is really more of an exercise in good coding practices. And there is of course the concern of php injection attacks.
- The cache filenames are now generated as a sha1 sum, with the help of an admin-defined shared secret so that they cannot be easily guessed.
- All cache files now start with a dot (.) so that most web servers will not even serve them, and in case directory listing is enabled at the server level.
- On the other hand, there is still a very strong emphasis on user input sanitization and usage in the logic itself (EG: ni client-defined source URL, source validity tests, etc).
- Fully valid class documentation can be leveraged in IDE such Eclipse, auto-documentation tool such as phpDocumentor, etc.
Historical releases
See the log archives for more information on older releases.
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