Freshmeat offeres several XML feeds of new project releases as well as an RDF representation of its software map and all releases. Until recently the Freshmeat RSS feed that I was subscribed to was a no-nonsense short list of projects with new releases. To view information about a particular release, I just CTRL-clicked on the project name to get more information in a new FireFox tab.
That has obviously changed recently. I’m pretty sure that the barebones feed has gone away, and I’ve now been redirected to fm-releases-global.xml. Here’s a quick list of available feeds:
- fm-releases-global.xml
- fm-releases-handheld.xml
- fm-releases-osx.xml
- fm-releases-themes.xml
- fm-releases-unix.xml
The release feeds are RSS 2.0 generated by PyRSS2Gen and are just beutiful. The new feeds provide most of the critical information that I would want to know about a new release: project name, branch, version, project description, changes for this version, and a screenshot if available. That totally rocks! Here’s an example from a release that hit my aggregator this morning:
Title: gnormalize 0.12 (Default branch)
Link: http://freshmeat.net/releases/186939/
Description:
gnormalize is a graphical front end to normalize. It decodes the MP3/OGG files to wave, then normalizes the wave and re-encodes it to MP3/OGG. It can also convert audio format between MP3 and OGG, change the encoding and ID3 tag properties of final normalized files.
Changes:
This release can now convert audio format between MP3 and OGG.
Thanks, freshmeat. You’ve totally made my morning!
Testing comments with spam filtering on. It’s really a stopgap measure until I can find something better.
If I saw you in the street I’d spit on you.
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This doesn’t freaking work any more. Can anyone help find a fix??? Please contact me @ cb 4t wasteland dawt org if so. I promise I’ll love you if you do it.