Simply one of the smoothest upgrading experience I had. No tricky steps, no surprises, it just worked… Folks at WordPress did an excellent job on this.<

2005 was an eventful year for me. But everything turned out to be pretty good. Looking forward to a great 2006!

I wish you all a happy new year!

(GreatNews users, how about leaving a comment in your native language? I know you are from more than 60 countries! )

Greg discovered GreatNews a week ago. And he still likes it after a week’s use…

Randy Charles Morin over KBCafe is doing a rss usage poll. The numbers more or less confirmed what I always guessed, that a lot of rss users are reading 100+ channels regularly (try that with a plain browser!).

1. If you use GreatNewsSetup.exe before, please download the newer GreatNewsSetup.exe and run the setup.
2. If you use GreatNews.zip before, please download the newer GreatNews.zip and unzip to your existing greatnews directory, overwrite existing files when prompted to.

Both GreatNewsSetup.exe and GreatNews.zip will keep your subscriptions, and will upgrade them to new data formats automatically if necessary.

Highly recommended!

http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php

A new version of GreatNews is out with a long list of updates!

The new features include new statistics reports, security enhancements, reminder of inactive channels and a lot of other stuff. This public beta is definitely the best GreatNews version to date.

To zip file users, now GreatNews.zip can be used for upgrading too. Just unzip the files to your local GreatNews directory. There’s no more GreatNews_upgrade.zip.

Nightly build 338 includes new statistics reports that show blog activities.(Under Tools->Channel Statistics) It’s kinda embarrassing to find this blog among the least active blog in last 60 days among my subscriptions…

The most-active-blog report is less informative because major news sites like CNN and Yahoo occupy most slots. It would be more useful if I can find a way to tell who’re the individual bloggers and only include them in the statistics. Maybe add a threshold that excludes sites publishing more than 10 items a day?

Yesterday I got a chance to check last week’s server log: 10K+ downloads in a week because of the new public beta. Not bad for a tiny rss reader in a crowded market, especially considering I hasn’t published it on any download sites like CNET or Tucows. Thank you everyone who helped spreading GreatNews!

One thing in the log surprised me is that 52.7% of downloads are for GreatNews.zip. I thought most downloads are to upgrade from previous versions, and user would have downloaded much more setup_unicode.exe or GreatNews_upgrade.zip. No wonder I keep getting emails complaining channels disappeared after upgrade….

I guess having two zip files is too confusing for average users. I’m going to change GreatNews in upcoming build 336 so that a single zip file can be used for both new install and upgrade . Hopefully when next beta is released, nobody suffers losing channel subscription again.

It seems every tech-related blog mentioned Google Blog Search one way or another today. For fun I added Google Blog Search to GreatNews search channel list in nightly build 331, so I can have an excuse to talk about it too!

Randy showed a trick to track links to your blog through google blog search. For example, to track links to my site, I added a new search channel, select “Google Blog Search”, and set keyword to link:curiostudio.com. Works great!

Update: I added “Google Blog Search By Date” in Build 333. The link tracking works even better this way…