tail -f development.log

Over the past two days I have made several pretty significant updates to the FeedCache plugin for Wordpress.

Version 1.0.4 is now available at wordpress.org for you to download.

The most significant changes are related to the plugin configuration and Ruby CRON script processing. FeedCache no longer accesses the file system for storing configuration and RSS feed caches. There is now a single master configuration file and a YAML file with all the feed group listings. I’m using the spyc php yaml class library for the YAML processing and it works as promised.

The Ruby CRON script now uses the more standard FeedTools gem instead of the old feedparser library I was using. FeedTools seems to be much more stable and memory-friendly then feedparser and I’m pretty happy with it.

Another HUGE improvement for the Ruby CRON script is the fact that all RSS feeds are now cached directly into your Wordpress database instead of in plaintext cache files like previous versions. You will need the ActiveRecord gem available on your server (along with Rubygems, of course).

If you are hosted on Dreamhost, you already have all the necessary gems installed automatically so you won’t need to install them yourself. If you are like man and host on your own dedicated server or even a VPS, just install the gems with the usual commands:

sudo gem install

I also have FeedCache hosted up on GitHub now if you are interested and are a GitHub user. If you want to help work on FeedCache or expand/enhance the plugin, fork the code on GitHub and submit any patches to me there.