News

Feedback Fun 2006-01-30 19:54:50

In an effort to keep things timely, we're testing out a feedback mechanism that is commonly becoming known as a shoutbox. While there is still email, we don't like to be spammed and we don't want you to have to worry about us spamming you (though we never would! :-). There are also feedback forms, but we're going to try out a shoutbox. It's nice and small, and fits on the main page in the same place the ads go on the archive pages. Please use it to give quick feedback or to let us know if you spot a duplicate we missed.

No More "Selfish Widget" Direct Linking 2006-01-24 18:20:44

There has been an increasing proliferation of Dashboard widgets that seemingly do nothing more than display the RSS feeds for a site and/or exploit affiliate programs. While they're welcome to write such widgets and while we will still list them, a duplicate that we manually group will no longer result in the listing getting a direct link as it does for other software.

Of Versions And Names 2006-01-11 19:21:29

We have made the slightest change to our RSS feed, replacing the middle dot separator with a tab. In theory, this will be both friendlier to automated readers, who can now treat name and version as tab-delimted fields, and it should read more smoothly for us humans, too. A tab is also much less likely to be a significant part of name or version strings. Not that a middle dot is particularly common, mind you, but the sites we aggregate all seem to have a nasty habit of using very common delimiters like spaces and dashes when they feed their updates. That's why you occasionally see part of a version number stuffed in the with name. Our parser does a pretty good job, but we also hope to improve it in 2006.