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.

11 Responses to MXNA 2.0 Public Beta

  2. Brian Rinaldi says:
    April 5, 2005 at 9:15 am

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

  3. jim says:
    April 5, 2005 at 9:29 am

    Is the source code available?

  4. Josh Dura says:
    April 5, 2005 at 11:10 am

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

  5. Abel Rios says:
    April 5, 2005 at 11:43 am

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

  6. Robert M. Hall says:
    April 5, 2005 at 12:16 pm

    Very cool – nice work Christian!

  7. Alex Hubner says:
    April 5, 2005 at 4:15 pm

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

  8. Steven Erat says:
    April 5, 2005 at 6:16 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? ;-)

  9. mike chambers says:
    April 5, 2005 at 8:49 pm

    >starsYou can find info on what is going on here:http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/FAQ.cfm#s2Basically, 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 chambersmesh@macromedia.com

  10. dCTRL says:
    April 6, 2005 at 10:27 am

    thanks for the german support! greetings from zurich/switzerland