First update in over a year. I had almost forgotten the existence of the activeRenderer Users Gallery page :-). Anyway, my hat's off to Dawn and Drew.

While they are not using Radio Userland as their publication tool, they've made a great use of the public activeRenderer web service and its XML-RPC API to create outlined show notes for their podcasts.

Thanks to the audio transcluding feature of activeRenderer 2.5 built into the web service, you can listen to their podcasts directly inside the show note page by clicking the small 'loudspeaker' wedge icon in the 'MP3 File' paragraph.

After the customary delays (even worse than my worst estimates this time :-), the new version 2.5 of activeRenderer is now available for download.

Here is a quick summary of activeRenderer 2.5's new and upgraded features.

Plain text rendering: activeRenderer now renders regular text documents in addition to OPML outlines and RSS news feeds. It even renders dot-head format files, for nostalgia's sake.

Word documents rendering: in addition to plain text, activeRenderer now renders Microsoft Word documents - .doc files. For this feature to work, Microsoft Word has to be installed on the system running the Radio/activeRenderer application.

Automatic importing feature: any text or Word document dropped, saved or modified in aR's new www/imports folders is automatically rendered as an OPML document in the matching www/outlines folder. This triggers its upstreaming as DHTML on the public site.

Audio transclusion: the transclusion mechanism in activeRenderer now recognizes several audio file formats when processing OPML link attributes: ".mp3", "m4a" (Apple), ".wav" (Microsoft) and ".mid" (MIDI). These audio links are rendered in the outline's DHTML version with a new 'speaker' wedge.

Clicking the speaker wedge creates a small player object under the linking node, sized according to the linking node's width. The audio content starts playing. You can control the sound output through the player object.

This should be helpful to poscasters who are publishing show notes in OPML format using Radio with activeRenderer, or are using the activeRenderer web service.

Importing feeds from mySubscriptions.opml: activeRenderer's outline browser now has a new import button at the bottom of its news feed list [screenshot]. Clicking import, you can locate a subScriptions.opml file on your local system or on the Web [screenshot], and ask activeRenderer to automatically add all the feeds of that file into Radio's aggregator: mass subscription!

Registration is back: It's optional, works fast [screenshot], the server side processing is simple and hosted in NYC. Registration is a first step in getting to know activeRenderer users, something that is very important in any community driven project. So please take a few seconds to register once aR 2.5 is installed.

Complete release notes are available on the ar-announce Yahoo group. Indeed, ar-announce and ar-support have been the places where most of the action took place these past months. In an effort to take better advantage of RSS publishing, I will publish more detailed information about each aR 2.5 new feature on this channel in the coming days.

Version 2.3.1, announced last June, is now officially reported Missing In Action, fallen to determined bug attacks - and pressing other engagements - during the testing phase. RIP.

At long last, activeRenderer 2.4 is now ready for download. It has all the features of 2.3.1, and a whole bunch of others. Here's a short list:

• The registration process at first time installation is now history: I couldn't afford the time to replace the aging (defunct?) registration service graciously offered by eVectors in Northen Italy. New users: we'd still love hearing from you, drop us a note anyway.
• activeRenderer is now available in German, thanks to Werner Bohlmann and a little help from Albert Baeumel, as well as in Italian, thanks to Fabio Artuso. Gwénaël's work in vs. 2.3 makes localization almost painless; we're still looking for Spanish, Dutch and Danish contributions. To switch languages, use the popup at the bottom of activeRenderer's preferences page.
• The outline rendering of RSS feeds and of Radio's aggregator is vastly improved: no more risks of crashing Radio when feeds contain malformed HTML Tags. I also added a clever (I hope) sentences processor to separate posts content into outline nodes in a clean way (this was a major endeavour, took way too long :-)
• The outline browser got a little face surgery. You can check it out on the demo site.

  Local lists in the 'news' and 'outlines' tabs are now selectable. After selecting an entry, you can either delete it (unsubscribe for an RSS feed) or rename it. Clicking twice on an entry puts you directly in text editing mode.

  When browsing a news feed which is not in your subscription list already, you can subscribe to it directly. Finally you can enlarge or reduce the font used to display outlines.
• At Thomas Burg's request, you can open transcluded Flash or QT Movie objects full size in a different window when clicking on the new 'spyglass' button that appears at the right of the transcluded node.
• At Gwénaël's suggestion, I added a new startup preference so that aR may republish in the background at a programmable interval all pages created using a template that includes the rssBox macro.
  

If I can convince Gwénaël to lead the development of the next 2.5 version of activeRenderer, it will include wizards to easily format and style rssBox and activeRoll macros in weblog publishing templates.