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April 05, 2005

MXNA 2.0 Public Beta

I'd like to invite you all to participate in the MXNA 2.0 beta.  MXNA (Macromedia XML News Aggregator) 2.0 is a complete rewrite of the original version of MXNA with several new features including:

  1. Smart Categories.
  2. Support for non-English feeds.
  3. Localization support.
  4. Self-service site submission.
  5. Improved ping support.
  6. Ability to translate posts (using Google's translation engine).
  7. Ability to generate custom RSS feeds from MXNA 2.0.
  8. Improved search including an advanced search option.
  9. Huge performance improvements.
  10. Improved (we think) interface.
  11. New design (thanks to Josh Dura).
  12. Much better web service API.
  13. More powerful mobile interface.
  14. Atom support.
  15. Pre-fetching and caching of top rated items.

You can find the new version of MXNA here:

http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna

If you are not already aggregated by MXNA, you can submit your feed here:

http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/SubmitFeed.cfm

If your language is not listed, let us know, and we'll add it. All languages are supported.

Keep in mind that this is a beta, which is fancy way of saying that there are bugs to be fixed, and kinks to be worked out. Please email any issues you find to mxna@macromedia.com. Some additional notes:

  1. The original version of MXNA will remain active for the time being, but eventually all MXNA traffic will be redirected to MXNA 2.0. You might as well start updating your bookmarks now.
  2. All new weblogs will be added to MXNA 2.0 only.
  3. The MXNA 1.0 web service API will be deprecated eventually in favor of the much more comprehensive 2.0 API.
  4. If you have a ping URL, you will need to update it by replacing "www.markme.com" with "weblogs.macromedia.com". Eventually pings will be redirected, but it's still best to start using the new URL.
  5. Some non-English feeds are not parsing correctly for some reason which I think has to do with character encodings. The majority are working fine, but some are not readable. If you have any insight into what the problem might be, let me know. Otherwise, I'll get it figured out and fixed during the beta period.

Thanks for helping us test, and let us know what you think.

Posted by cantrell at April 5, 2005 03:25 AM | References

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Comments

Cool!

Posted by: Danger at April 5, 2005 06:30 AM

My first impression is that this is a major improvement. Thanks for your hard work.

Posted by: Brian Rinaldi at April 5, 2005 09:15 AM

Is the source code available?

Posted by: jim at April 5, 2005 09:29 AM

Nice work! Great design too :) Wonder who did that? *cough cough hint hint* :)

Posted by: Josh Dura at April 5, 2005 11:10 AM

Really nice! A lot of neat goodies along with a new design. Now I gotta get used to the new interface... :)

Posted by: Abel Rios at April 5, 2005 11:43 AM

Very cool - nice work Christian!

Posted by: Robert M. Hall at April 5, 2005 12:16 PM

Charset support and auto-detection? Looks the validator is not parsing charsets other than UTF-8 correctly.

Posted by: Alex Hubner at April 5, 2005 04:15 PM

Its interesting how the number of stars increases for a given blog entry, and then later the decreases for the same entry. Maybe its weighted so that if other blogs start getting more clicks your stars go down proportionally? ;-)

Posted by: Steven Erat at April 5, 2005 06:16 PM

>stars

You can find info on what is going on here:

http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/FAQ.cfm#s2

Basically, it is showing how popular an item is relative to other items in the last 24 hours.

It gives you an idea of its relative popularity.

mike chambers

mesh@macromedia.com

Posted by: mike chambers at April 5, 2005 08:49 PM

thanks for the german support! greetings from zurich/switzerland

Posted by: dCTRL at April 6, 2005 10:27 AM

extraordinary !!

Posted by: YILMAZ UGURLU at April 6, 2005 10:35 AM