So you're a baseball fan. And you have an iPhone. And you're tired of how slow it is to check ESPN for up-to-the-minute baseball scores and news. Well, today's your lucky day because we just released a new Leaflet for baseball and it's awesome. Read all about it.
This is going to sound insane, but here goes anyway: I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of xPad, version 1.2.5.
This is a Universal version of xPad and it's completely free. It has all registration and nag items/limits removed, and it's blazing fast on both Intel and PowerPC Macs.
xPad still lacks features I know it needs (global search, Spotlight integration), but these will have to wait until I open source it and smarter people add them (this is still planned, and now you know why I haven't done it yet). For now, the goal was to release a bug-free, high quality Universal/free version of xPad.
Many months ago, when the whole xPad debacle went down, Brian Ball's developer released an updated version of xPad (which he called 1.2), that did not have nearly the care or quality of previous xPad builds. This version, which I created, does. You'll note that it looks the same as before (and does not include visual bugs like that of the Ball version), only now it's Universal, faster, and free.
If you upgraded to that Ball version (1.2), please upgrade to this newer version. Things should look a lot better.
I hope it's useful for people. I still use xPad from time to time, and now it's much faster on my Intel Mac.
Today I released version 2.0.2 of SimpleLog. This version fixes a few bugs found since the release of 2.0 last week and adds one really nice feature—future posting. You can now create posts in SimpleLog with dates in the future and they won't appear on your site until the right time.
As always, upgrading is quick and painless just like installing. If you haven't given SimpleLog a shot, you should check out some screenshots of the admin interface or read the excellent review Garrett Dimon wrote about it the other day.
After six and a half months, hundreds of fixes, tweaks and new features, I'm finally announcing the release of SimpleLog version 2.0.
This release is packed. A highlight of some key features/changes:
- Fully compatible with Rails 1.2.1!
- Comments with spam protection, blacklist, approval and a comments RSS feed
- New admin interface design
- "Static" pages
- Faster searching and full search results page
- Improved caching, preference loading and more for a much faster and stable application
- New default theme
- Support for Gravatars
- Subdomain and subdirectory support
- Tons of bugfixes
- Even easier to install or upgrade
I've been working on this version for a very long time now, and I'm extremely proud of the way it turned out. If you're curious, you can see the changelog to get an idea of just how much work has been done in the last few months.
In addition to the new release, I've created the SimpleLog wiki which is full of helpful information and will grow over time as I and users add more to it, as well as some simple forums for users to talk to each other and ask for help if they can't find it anywhere else.
Special thanks to Shawn Morrison, Garrett Dimon and Dan Conner who provided tremendous beta testing and general help during the long development phase, as well as the rest of my private beta testers.
You can view screenshots of the admin interface and default theme at Flickr. You can also digg this announcement.
Update: If you downloaded this version and got a rake error when trying to install, please re-download it. There was an error in the TGZ that caused rake not to work but it has been fixed.
Version 1.2 of SimpleLog has been released! In addition to the fully functional XML-RPC API (so you can post from desktop apps like MarsEdit or from Flickr), there's also an automatic update checking feature so you'll always know when a new version of SimpleLog is released, without having to manually check (you can also turn this off if you want).
I'm also officially announcing anonymous SVN access and the SimpleLog Trac.
To checkout SimpleLog anonymously, use http://svn.simplelog.net with both the username and password "anonymous" (without the quotes). Obviously, this is the live SVN repository, so keep in mind that there could be bugs in the trunk. I wouldn't recommend using the code in the trunk on your site (unless you like living dangerously), but this will be very useful for people who make changes to the app's main code and want to run things like diff when they go to upgrade.
The Trac is going to become very important from this point on. You can now submit trouble tickets, feature requests and the like, as well as viewing current tickets. You can also get an idea of planned release schedules and browse the source of the app (with SVN notes).
I've still got plenty of features to add to SimpleLog, and development is ongoing. Hopefully, these resources will give you even more of a reason to try SimpleLog, or even switch to it.
Many thanks to Jeremy Bogan of Segpub for helping me get public SVN and Trac set up as well. Segpub is the recommended host for SimpleLog (and I don't get any money from saying that).
Update: Also just released version 1.2.1, a bugfix.
I've just released a quick bugfix build of SimpleLog, version 1.1.1. Grab it from the site and you'll have it installed in no time. It's not a major bug, but it could affect a few people (like, say, Shawn, who noticed it).
I promise, eventually, I'll go back to writing about things other than just SimpleLog...
Now would be a good time to use that built-in updates check in SimpleLog, because version 1.1 has been released!
It seems a little silly to call this version only 1.1, since the changelog is insanely long and this app has really come a long way from 1.0. Thanks to Shawn (who is currently changing his site over to SimpleLog) and all of my beta testers for their hard work!
Of course, please remember that SimpleLog is free, but donations are accepted and encouraged. Half of all donations go to the National MS Society. As of this writing, $71.67 USD has been sent to the MS Society, so keep your donations coming.
There are plenty more updates to SimpleLog to come. As always, give me your feedback, your complaints, your suggestions, all of it. Even better if you send it all to feedback at simplelog.net.
I'm going to make a few screencasts (installing, updating, customizing) in the coming days, but until then you can view some new screenshots of the admin interface at Flickr.
Consider this the official announcement—SimpleLog has been released. Many thanks to Shawn, the lead tester of this app (he also lead tested xPad), and the private beta testers who worked over the past few weeks to help me finalize version 1.0. A little about the app:
SimpleLog is a simple Ruby on Rails weblog application with support for tagging, archiving and quick-search. It features a simple admin section with authentication and a focus on writing over all else.
SimpleLog started out with the work I'd done on my CMS here at Maniacal Rage, but I started over with smarter code and a release plan in mind. I moved this site over to SimpleLog a while back, so everything you see here is what you can do with the package.
The application is free, but donations are accepted and encouraged.
Update: I forgot to mention that 50% of all donations will be going to The National MS Society, an important detail. Also, I've uploaded some screenshots of the admin interface to Flickr. In the near future, I plan to do a screencast showing how to install SimpleLog and some example usage.
Also, if you use SimpleLog on your site, please send me an email. I'm going to compile a list of people using the app for the website. You may also post screenshots of your site in the SimpleLog Users group on Flickr.