Sorry guys, earlier today the formatting and everything got fucked up. I'm sure it made it appear as though everything was down, but it was just that the DNS @ CNAME record was omitted when I transferred codezen.org to gandi.

I forgot one major thing in the previous post: Non-text content handling. I'd like to be able to grab images and other content and fork them over to another process. For example, opening embedded images in an external program like fbv in a framebuffer or even just firefox, minus the other content.

By the way.

While I'm posting, I'd like to toss a shout out to N30N from the Arch Linux AUR. He's been fucking on top of packaging my little program from Day One, before Canto was really even usable (of course, cynics would say it's still not, but that's beside the point). If you're ever in Austin, I'll buy you a beer, man.

Well, the current tree in git is definitely starting to look like a major update. I don't know how it happened. I think it's just that a number of minor updates brought a number of major features within easy lunchtime striking distance.

What's already there

• canto-fetch is now threaded, and much faster
• Both canto and canto-fetch are using better locks, canto-fetch's locks are much finer too.
• canto's reader output has been overhauled from a simple set of regexes to an actual HTML parser (thanks to Python's wonderful sgmllib). Things like blockquotes and lists are beautiful and the formatting of feeds is much less... haphazard. (This was inspired by Aaron Swartz's html2text.py, but is more Canto specific)
• A new message / input bar is now a permanent feature of the interface, replacing the floating info bars. In addition, the input has typical Emacs-y bindings (like C-g to exit, movement, etc). This is thanks to the builting Python curses.textpad Textbox class.

Interestingly enough, all of this has been added and (as of this writing) the new version is about 50 lines shorter than 0.5.7.

What needs to be completed

• The input bar is going to be turned into a minimal command interface. I'm not sure yet whether this is going to be a user-friendly type deal or more of a debugging tool (depending on how invasive it is).
• There will be an option to have a specified, permanent reader window taking up n-lines of the screen.
• Some rendering bugs have been introduced and need to be fixed

In addition, the 0.6.0 release will be branched, one version for Python 2.5 and another for 2.6/3.0. There shouldn't be too many places where the two should be incompatible as is, but I'd like to use some of the nice 3.0 semantics for stuff like the aforementioned file locking. Anything that can be handling with imports from __future__ will be "backported" to the main branch.

EDIT: Yet another thing is that I'd like to port the website over to a flat markdown like system (like I keep my blog, so that the markdown content can be easily packaged with the source and tracked in Git so that every time I do a major release like this I don't have to spend two days updating the documentation after I make the release. It's retarded.

You can grab the 0.5.7 release in tar or deb format from the download page.

• Add -r flag to add URL from the command line.
• Added save() example keybind to canto/extra.py
• Fix nasty text browser problems from 0.5.6

Just a couple of bugfixes, and minor features. The save function in canto/extra.py an interesting little configuration snippet that is meant as a template that could be used to output story information in any format, like XML or Markdown for inclusion in a template, or the beginnings of a StumbleUpon-esque send to friend mailer.

Anyway, have fun!

You can grab the 0.5.6 release in tar or deb format from the download page.

• Fix OPML import
• Fix changing feed names immediately
• Two feeds with the same name are now merged
• Add -b (background flag) to canto-fetch

Hot on the heels of the 0.5.5 release, a few bug fixes. OPML import was strangely broken, and canto-fetch really needed -b to avoid reliance on screen.