Three-week Ubuntu Experiment - Migrating to Open-Source

This past spring I made an attempt to move myself out of the shackles of the commercial software world and truly embrace open-source. I tried to move my primary machine off Windows 7, and onto Ubuntu Linux. I knew the transition wouldn’t be seamless but I’d heard so many good things about living in a Linux universe that I decided it was time.

The experiment did not go as well as I might have hoped, and despite my efforts to stick with it for some time, I eventually had to cut the experiment short. As I was preparing to re-image my system I started a blog post which I decided not to post at the time. I’ve included a short excerpt which shows my state of mind back in May, just after the experiment concluded.

I told myself I was going to stick it out for at least 3 months. But here I sit, not 3 weeks after making the decision to migrate my primary machine to Ubuntu, with the Windows 7 installation disk in hand. What could possibly have brought me to this point? Primarily, time.

It’s going to take me about 8 hours of work to prep all the data on my system for the transition, wipe the linux partition, re-install windows, re-install the applications, re-install VMWare, re-install my Linux VMs (I do still have a use for them!). The problem is, things on linux generally have taken longer than they should. Some of this is due to the fact that I’m learning, and I’ve tried to ignore those. Others are generally due to the fit and finish of Ubuntu.

So what went wrong?

Problem #1 - 10.10 or 11.04?

I generally resist the temptation to move to the latest OS release, but when I tried setting up a Windows VM under VirtualBox in Ubuntu 10.10 the audio was mucked up. It seemed a bit slow too, but that may have been my imagination. So I tried installing the newly minted 11.04. The VM now worked like a charm, but that was a long multi-step process.

Problem #2 - Virtualization

Trying to set up a virtual machine that would start up at boot time (like a Windows service or any number of linux daemons) proved a nearly impossible task. After several hours of searching, tweaking, testing, and ultimately failing, I decided to abandon the effort and live with manually starting my VMs.

Problem #3 - File Sharing

Setting up network shares was probably one of the better experiences I had. I was able to set up a “public” share on the linux machine and access it from anywhere on the network… as long as I didn’t want to protect it with a username and password. That was going to require more voodoo and black magic than I was prepared to endure for such a simple task. Overall, not a bad experience.

Problem #4 - Flash in Browsers

Like it or not Flash is still an integral part of the web, and Flash in the browser was just one of those things that never quite worked right. When I talk about fit and finish of a product, this is what I mean. Blocky artifacts showing up on video players was the most common issue, though there were other things like playback and audio problems as well.

Problem #5 - Lack of Air Support

The fact that I felt compelled to write a blog post calling attention to a tutorial for getting Adobe Air installed under Ubuntu 11.04 speaks to just how difficult this didn’t need to be. On any other major platform, you can go to a website and simply click the install button. The rest is automatic. Not here though.

Problem #6 - Button Clicks

I constantly had problems just clicking on buttons. Sometimes in an application (Chromium comes to mind) but sometimes just within the Ubuntu environment itself. This kind of thing makes you start to question the faith you have in your OS.

Problem #7 - Learning Curve

I suppose it’s a bit unfair to put this here as it’s undoubtedly the same issue that would come up moving between any two major operating systems. The bottom line is that I have a young family with whom I like to spend the majority of my day. That means that when I decide to sit down at the computer to do something, I don’t really have the time to spend learning how to do things all over again.

There were a few things that were also pleasant surprises during this whole thing. Mostly to do with 3rd party applications.

CrashPlan support

CrashPlan was able to seamlessly match up my Windows backup to the Linux file system. This made it very easy to move everything over. I just hope it works as well in reverse.

AcidRip

Digitizing DVDs has never been easier. It took a couple of tries to get the quality settings just where I wanted them, but the process worked out really well.

Shell

I love the *nix shell, Bash in particular. This is the one thing I will truly miss when I move back to Windows. Having commands like rsync at my disposal, and built in SSH support are also fantastic. While this is something that has to be hacked into a Windows installation, it is available by default on OS X.

In summary…

The availability of good software to do most tasks is one of the key benefits of moving to an open source experience, but the truth is that the experience really didn’t live up to my hopes or my expectations. I’m getting to the point where I want my computing time to be spent creating, not just experimenting with different ways that I could set up my tool sets. And as time moves on, the number of free or open-source applications available on the major commercial platforms like Windows and OS X is growing. Once either of those operating systems is installed I can do everything I want to do without having to pay a license for another piece of software – and in many cases the applications are as good or better than the open-source tools available for the Linux platforms. Add to that the growing number of applications which reside in the cloud and are completely browser and platform agnostic and it starts to become a simple equation for me.

Is it worth the $150 or so that it costs to get my new computer preloaded with a commercial OS? Yes.

Turn off URL Trimming in Firefox

With the latest release of Firefox, Mozilla has decided that we don’t need to see the “http://” at the beginning of a URL. While this may be true for day- to-day browsing, it makes copying and pasting URLs a bloody nightmare.

Most applications detect a URL based on it starting with some sort of protocol directive (http://, https://, ftp://, mailto:). By removing that directive from the beginning of the URL Mozilla now forces us to type them in as we go, reducing productivity and generally being a pain in the behind.

For the record, this portion of the URL is still visible for https:// URLs to help everyone know that pages are encrypted using SSL/TLS. This somehow makes it even worse in my eyes, since this non-security related behaviour is different based on whether or not the application is encrypted.

You can, however, correct this abhorrent behaviour with a trip to the Firefox about:config page.

DISCLAIMER: Read the disclaimer on the about:config page.

  1. Go to the about:config page in Firefox [![](http://kdmurray.net/wp- content/uploads/2011/10/trimUrls–1–300x127.png)](http://kdmurray.net/wp- content/uploads/2011/10/trimUrls–1.png)

  2. In the filter box, type in: browser.urlbar.trimURLs [![](http://kdmurray.net/wp- content/uploads/2011/10/trimUrls–2–300x78.png)](http://kdmurray.net/wp- content/uploads/2011/10/trimUrls–2.png)

  3. Double-click on the value to change from true to false [![](http://kdmurray.net/wp- content/uploads/2011/10/trimUrls–3–300x78.png)](http://kdmurray.net/wp- content/uploads/2011/10/trimUrls–3.png)

After making the change, that line will show up in bold to indicate that it has been changed from the default setting. This is helpful if you want to restore settings to their default at some point in the future – though in this case I can’t imagine why.

Happy linking!

Aftermath of a Hack

This site was hacked. While it’s still unclear exactly how it happened, or precisely when, sometime in the past 6 weeks my blog, at least 2 other websites and possibly my DreamHost shell account were all hacked. I’m generally a pretty security conscious person, but even I get lazy from time to time. It wasn’t clear to me just how dangerous that laziness could be until this week. I’m going to outline a bit below some of the issues which may have led to my problems, and talk about the steps that have now been taken to help prevent them from occurring again in the future.

The Problem

![Problem Alert](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/196/509911344_a9e7d94b9d_m.jp g)In retrospect I can see five things I did wrong, and all of them can be traced back to laziness or perhaps, to be less forbidding, they can be traced back to actions taken (or not taken) for the sake of convenience.

Error #1 - Out-of-date Software

Many of us take the time to make sure our operating systems and browsers are up-to-date and fully patched; but do we take the necessary time to make sure that all of our software is patched? Particularly things which don’t reside on our home computers? If you run your own blog, forum or other website and are responsible for your own updates can you say unequivocally that you are currently running the latest and greatest version? Software that is out of date by as little as one revision may have critical vulnerabilities which could allow for disruption of your site, or even execution of commands on your web server.

([aside: If you don’t use Secunia’s PSI product on your home PC at least once a month, you should.])

Error #2 - Abandoned Web Properties

This goes hand-in-hand with the out-of-date software but is, in some ways, a bit trickier to prevent. It is far easier to remember to update software on sites which you update and monitor on a regular basis. It’s far more difficult to monitor sites which have been, for lack of a better term, abandoned. In my case there were three separate sites on my account which were running versions of their software which were more than 12 months out-of-date. The reason was that I was no longer maintaining these sites and had, in essence, forgotten they were still there. I had hidden a couple of them by renaming the homepage which made it look (to the casual observer) like the sites weren’t there but of course all of the other pages were still in their normal locations and were full of holes.

Error #3 - Shared User Accounts

Sharing is good, right? Not in this case… I have a several different domains hosted under a single hosting account. DreamHost is really generous allowing customers to register any number of domains and attach them to the account. I host sites for myself, for family and for a couple of organizations I’m affiliated with. This in and of itself does not cause a problem. The security hole in my plan was that most of these domains were hosted on a single user account. This means that if that shared user account gets compromised, all of the domains which are run on that user account are potentially at risk.

Error #4 - Lack of Backups

The websites had no viable backups. Because no regular backups were being run of the account, it was virtually impossible to trace when the hack initially occurred. If there had been regular full or differential backups being made of the various websites it may have been possible to determine when the initial attack took place and roll all of the sites back to the way they were before they were compromised. In addition, if there had been any data loss (there does not appear to have been) the lack of backups could have meant the loss of many hours of work.

Error #5 - Reused Credentials

We hear it all the time – do not reuse usernames and passwords on your various accounts, particularly accounts you care about or are important. Account reuse increases the chances that a hack on one site can do more wide-spread damage than the initial compromised password should really allow. My main SSH credentials were a username and password that I had used on over 100 different sites and services. I know for sure that one of the web properties I use had these particular credentials released into the wild. Why didn’t I change the password? I don’t know. If that was the entry vector, it is quite possible that a number of other accounts of mine have also been compromised.

Overall Impact

![“Fire in the Hole”](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3204/2899529924_f4bdcdf6 e7_m.jpg)The impact was (thankfully) minimal. Only two sites of value were compromised, and it appears that all of the data for those sites is undamaged. A number of other obsolete sites were compromised as well but as they are no longer actively used they are of no great loss. It also appears that some sort of mass-mailing script was being run from the account as well. My server-side user account had received over 27K “Message Undeliverable” replies from various web servers. I hate to think how many it was able to send successfully.

The Cleanup

![Pug WIth Mop and Mop Bucket](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/45/132638187_07 1e853af4_m.jpg)The cleanup had to be done in phases, addressing each of the five defects individually. Some of them were very easy to change, others required quite a bit more effort to implement and verify. However before any of the remediation could begin, the site needed to be cleansed.

The very first step was to ensure that my local machine had not been infected or compromised. I was pretty sure that it was clean as scans are run every night, but it would be like trying to wash a car with mud. No amount of scrubbing with the muddy sponge would get it clean. The machine checked out.

The second step was to change the passwords for all of the users on my hosting account, and change the main password for the account itself.

Next, data from the websites that needed to be saved was exported. None of the code for the software running those sites was saved, only the data. There was no way to tell if the software was clean or compromised so I decided to take no chances. The application software is not that difficult to install, and I was willing to take the hit on setting up modules, components and themes anew.

Once the data was backed up I wiped out all of the data on the user accounts which were being preserved. This meant a full wipe from the file-system from the operating-system shell on the server. All files and directories including “hidden” and “special” folders were wiped out. Some of these operations required the assistance of a DreamHost technician.

Step #1 - Remove all unused or obsolete websites

This was taken care of as part of the cleanup activities mentioned above. Simply removing the affected websites greatly decreased the attack surface of the account and reduced the number of attack vectors which could be used to attack the websites and/or the account.

Step #2 – Remove all un-needed user accounts

In the case of any obsolete sites, test accounts or test databases, these were removed directly from the hosting provider’s control panel as they would no longer be needed. Much like response #1, there is no sense in keeping any old files or data hanging around where they might later become a liability.

Step #3 - Change the passwords again

Once all of the files, scripts, data, databases, directories, logs and anything else I could think of were removed from the sites, the passwords were rotated again. This was done in the off-chance that there were cached credentials or some other form of persistent authentication lurking somewhere in the ether.

Step #4 - Create new per-domain user accounts

For each of the domains that would be remaining active, a new user account was created specifically for that user. These accounts would be used to connect to and install the necessary software on the websites, as well as to run backup and maintenance scripts. Passwords for these accounts were set to extremely long strings of random characters as they would not be required for day-to-day access and maintenance.

Step #5 - Set up public key authentication

For regular access to these sites, I decided to go with public key authentication. By requiring a private key (stored in an encrypted volume on my main desktop) and a lengthy but easy-to-remember passphrase I could fairly safely rely on the same public/private key pair to secure access to all of the websites. I found out during this step that both PuTTY’s puttygen application and my hosting provider’s implementation of OpenSSH have an upper-limit on the length of the passphrase. It is still a very long upper limit, but I was surprised to find it. If you share access to a website keys can be installed for each trusted user using the same method.

Step #6 – Change passwords again (optional)

Once the public-key authentication is in place the account passwords can be changed at will without affecting the state of the affected keys. This means that I have effectively made the public keys the only viable way of accessing the site over SSH short of having access to the main hosting provider account to do a password reset. Admittedly this step is for the very security conscious (read: paranoid) as I was quite certain at this point that the passwords on the system at this time had not been compromised. This however is to be the first step in a regularly scheduled series of password rotations that the system will handle on my behalf as a part of standard system maintenance.

Step #7 - Reinstall all server-side software

Once all of the base security measures was in place and tested, I set up the application software I wanted to run on the web server. The key here is to do the set up using copies of the software obtained only from trusted sources. What a trusted source is will vary from software package to software package, but typically the main project site for an open-source project (not a mirror) or the vendor website are good places to start. In this case downloading the latest stable WordPress release from the main website . I made sure not to rely on previously downloaded installation packages, getting the newest most up-to-date version I could lay my hands on.

Step #8 - Configure server-side software

Each software package is different, but going through all the configuration steps for your software package is important: don’t try to short-cut the process. In the case of WordPress we have to set up a MySQL database, set a number of hey/hash values which are used for authorization and cookies and finally set up the user accounts. I wanted to make sure that any passwords, keys or salt values were set using long randomly-generated strings. In my case I used the password generation function in LastPass. Other options would include tools like 1Password, RoboForm or Perfect Paper Passwords . The longer and more random the string is, the more difficult it will be to crack. I have been using values from 24 to 64 characters in length depending on the purpose. If you have a system that assigns default passwords for new user accounts, be sure to change those default system-generated passwords and replace them with your own strong credentials at this stage.

Step #9 - Set up extensions and themes for server-side software

Once I got the base configuration is in place it was time to add in the additional features I required for these sites. In my case it was a collection of WordPress plugins and themes. It is easy to forget that each extension, plugin or theme that you add to your website’s software package is in fact additional software that will be executed when the website is used. Just as with the base software package it is important to trust the source of your plugins and themes. If you are suspicious as to the origins of the software, choose something else. I also added the plugins and themes one at a time confirming after each step that there were no immediately visible defects.

Step 10 – Automated backup

The next step was to add a backup script for both the website and the associated database. By building this as a shell script it was possible to schedule full backups of the various sites and have them run on a set schedule. For now the script is very simple:

  1. Extract the contents of the database
  2. Zip the website and extracted database into a single archive
  3. Send that file over SFTP to a location off-site from the server There are other ideas for automation as well, but this post is long enough as it is. I will save those for later.

Lessons Learned

This could have been much worse. In many ways I count myself very lucky. I could have had all of my data wiped out, I could potentially have seen malware/scripts injected into my websites to capture login credentials or other sensitive information. This attack served as a warning and though I have had to spend a number of hours rethinking the way my websites are set up and managed, at the end of the day I will have better control over the sites I manage, better practices in place for dealing with security, and with any luck, better personal habits for dealing with information security.

Last, but certainly not least, a big thank you to the folks at DreamHost for confirming my initial diagnosis, helping to find the  possible entry vectors, providing guidance on cleanup and purging, and just generally doing that great customer service thing that they do.

Mango Day for Windows Phone 7

[![LG Optimus 7](http://kdmurray.net/wp- content/uploads/2010/12/lg_optimus_71–216x300.jpg)](http://kdmurray.net/wp- content/uploads/2010/12/lg_optimus_71.jpg)Today Windows Phone handsets around the world [begin to receive](http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/window sphone/archive/2011/09/27/windows-phone–7–5-mango-update-begins.aspx) their official Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” software updates. If you have a WP7 device check the [Where’s my Update](http://mango.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en- us/features/update-schedules.aspx)? page to see if your carrier is delivering “Mango”.

At this point it’s unclear whether the accelerated update process that worked for many of us when the “NoDo” update was released will be effective with “Mango”.

UPDATE 13:00: It appears that the old disconnect from the Internet trick still works!

Aussie Geek Podcast - Episode 46

![](http://kdmurray.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/folder- 150x150.jpg)The latest episode of the AGP is in the feed. This week Dave and I go over a few things that took place during our long absence and discuss news from Google, Twitter and Linux. We also have some fantastic apps for mobile, tablet and web and an illuminating story of recycling and ingenuity.

Dave and I had a great time putting this show together, and I had the opportunity to produce an episode of the AGP for the first time in well over a year. It felt good to get my hands dirty again, and I think Dave appreciated the break. ;)

Back to Basics

Over the past year my personal life as undergone some fairly major changes. I started a new job a little over a year back and there were the obvious changes that go along with that. But more importantly my wife and I welcomed our first child into the world and that was a life changing moment. Now, most of you know that I don’t talk about my personal life in the blog so suffice to say that we have thoroughly enjoyed our first year as parents. It is a wonderful experience and we eagerly await every new day to see what will happen next.

One of the things that changes when you have a new baby is the amount of time you can spend on yourself and your own hobbies and pursuits. I used to spend upwards of 4–6 hours every day outside of work on the computer blogging, coding, or otherwise toiling in one digital adventure or another. Now I find that the number ranges somewhere in the range of 0–2 hours per day. That is a pretty drastic reduction no matter how you slice it (about 80% for those of you scoring at home).

There are a number of projects that I have started and stopped over the past few years each of them trying to build a better mousetrap, or re-make something from scratch just to see if I could do it. With the limited time available to me now, I have become more focused on wanting to actually do more with the time I have – this means not reinventing the wheel every chance I get.

My wife and I have both found that we have become far more effective with our time, getting more done with less time than we ever have before. In the past couple of months I have started to extend that to my digital life as well. Gone are the days when I focused on a writing a to-do list, a backup utility, a blogging engine, a photo manager or a disk-erasing tool. There are lots of great (free) tools out there which can handle those tasks very well, even if they don’t satisfy all my neurotic desires (like how my historic completed work tasks should be handled, cataloged and stored for reporting purposes (you know, for when I will pull metrics on my completed work)).

I have also decided that diving in to learn a new, modern programming language is probably something that would realistically take more time than I’m willing to devote to the enterprise. Python, Ruby, Java, and the ASP.NET MVC framework are all on my list, but are undergoing changes and enhancements so frequently that I’m having trouble keeping up with what’s out there, nevermind trying to actually learn the stuff. But I do want to become a productive programmer in some language outside the rather constrained, and somewhat self-imposed, .NET bubble in which I have spent the majority of my professional career. Ideally I would like to write in something that I can port between operating systems without too much headache. Being able to produce code that will run on anyone’s machine is a great asset – especially when you have Windows, Mac and Linux machines in your own house to start with.

So the question is what can I learn that will allow me to:

  1. write code for multiple platforms
  2. grow as a developer
  3. not have to keep up with constant enhancements The answer I came to was 42 C. It seems to satisfy all of the criteria above for me in a way that other languages don’t.

C is by nature intended to be a multi-platform system. If you’re able to confine your applications to CGI or the command-line this is made even easier.

C also requires developers to know much more about how computers and compilers work than more contemporary languages like C#, Java or Python. Though it arguably makes programming more difficult, I think it will help me become a better programmer over time as I learn some of the trickier parts of getting a computer to do what I want it to do.

The current ANSI standard specification for C was introduced in 1999. This means that for the past 12 years, the standard for C programming has remained essentially unchanged. This makes C a good choice for someone who doesn’t have a great deal of time to keep up with changes and enhancements in the specification.

For all these reasons, and my own simple curiosity I’m embarking on an adventure to learn and become proficient in C. I make no assertions that I’m trying to master the language as I can’t see myself getting beyond the hobbyist or perhaps open-source contributor stages. I do have some ideas for the first couple of projects I would like to tackle once I get the basics out of the way. Hopefully I’ll be able to release some source code back into the world over the next year or two – after all, I’m in no hurry.

Adobe Air on Ubuntu 11.04 x64

I was having a devil of a time trying to get TweetDeck to even install under Ubuntu 11.04 until I came across this fantastic tutorial by deepok1968 on YouTube. The problem boils down to the Adobe Air installer not being all that happy with x64 systems in its native state.

If you visit the video page you can get a copy of the commands that he uses. I stuck them in a bash script so that I can re-use them if I need to do the install again.

Now I just need to figure out how he got that wicked looking OSX style dock…

'Leaking Tokens: Time to Change Your Facebook Password'

I don’t do this kind of thing lightly, but it might be a good idea to post this on your wall:

  • Facebook found a problem in the way that it was authenticating applications.
  • Any time you used an application a token was created that would allow the application to do it’s thing – including posting on your wall, accessing photos or whatever other permissions it requested.
  • The tokens did not expire and were being “leaked” through normal operation on Facebook.
  • Anyone who found a token would be able to use it to do the same things that you allowed the application to do – including posting on your wall, accessing photos or whatever other permissions it requested. It is important to note that Facebook has said there is no evidence that this has been exploited – yet.

The problem has now been fixed, but all the old tokens could still be usable until September 2011. You can re-secure your account by simply changing your Facebook password. This will invalidate any of the existing tokens.

Information Week has an article with more detail.

C# IsNumeric implementation

Here’s a quick and dirty implementation of “IsNumeric” in C#. This is one of those methods that just seems to be missing from C# which appears in so many other languages.

UPDATE 12-Apr–2011: After some fantastic discussion elsewhere I’ve modified the code to handle a number of additional scenarios. A point was also raised that a combination of Int64.TryParse() _and _ Decimal.TryParse() would accomplish the same thing. They would, almost, but those methods test for valid 64-bit integers and valid 64-bit decimals – they don’t test whether a string is numeric. Feed them a long enough string of numbers and they’ll return false. It’s a pretty fine distinction, I grant that, but I figured since I was writing the code I might as well make it as robust as possible.

        public static bool IsNumeric(string s)
        {
            return IsNumeric(s, false);
        }  
        public static bool IsNumeric(string s, bool allowDecimal)
        {
            bool result = true;
            if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(s))
            {
                return false;
            }  
            if (s.StartsWith("-"))
            {
                s = s.Substring(1);
            }  
            char[] chars = s.ToCharArray();  
            if (allowDecimal)
            {
                bool decimalFound = false;
                foreach (char c in chars)
                {
                    if (c == '.' && !decimalFound)
                    {
                        decimalFound = true;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        result = result & (char.IsNumber(c));
                    }
                }
            }
            else
            {
                foreach (char c in chars)
                {
                    result = result & char.IsNumber(c);
                }
            }  
            return result;
        }

I built 14 39 unit tests for this on the project I built it for throwing all sorts of weird and null data at it, and it seems to run fairly well and reasonably quickly. Any comments/suggestions are welcome.

FeedPublisher - A History

One of the things that has slowed the recent publication of episodes of blog posts (among other things) has been a desire to spend a good chunk of my on- the-computer time writing code. I’ve done a few little projects which I’ve put to use, started a half-dozen others which died on the drawing board, and have managed to get a couple working just the way I want them to help me with something that I actually want to get done.

It seems to me that some of the best pieces of code I’ve ever written are the ones I wrote to solve a problem that I had. The two WordPress plugins I wrote ([Random Image Selector](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/random-image- selector/) and [Admin Links Widget](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/admin- links-sidebar-widget/)) have met with far more success and way more downloads than I ever would have thought possible.

In that same vein of ‘solving my own problems with code’ I bring you FeedPublisher. This does only one thing, and it does it reasonably well: It downloads the contents of an RSS feed and creates an EPUB book out of it, suitable for transferring to your favourite eBook reader.

The bulk of the idea for this project came from my experiences with an application called Calibre which was shown to me by Knightwise. I’m paraphrasing a bit, but he had said it was the best application to come along for dealing with eBooks that he’d ever used. High praise coming from someone who prides himself on finding and using the best free cross-platform software that the Internet has to offer.

So I tried it out and really did like most of what it did. It can manage conversions to and from a number of different formats, it deals with PDFs like nobody’s business, and it had a really cool feature: download and convert blogs to eBooks.

The first thing I thought was that this would be a brilliant way to handle eBooks. But as I used it, a couple of things that just weren’t quite what I wanted. The created eBooks were a bit on the ugly side (and had notices that they’d been created with Calibre). But the larger problem was that it wasn’t really possible to schedule the download of the feeds. Calibre had to be running all the time for you to pick them up. This scheduling problem proved to be the final push I needed to get off my butt and create FeedPublisher.

FeedPublisher itself is a command-line app (for Windows only at the moment) which downloads the contents of a selected list of RSS (or Atom) feeds. Each feed becomes its own ePUB book containing the contents of the blog posts. This first version works quite well and rarely crashes but it’s definitely ‘beta’ quality software. Chances are it will work for you. :)

The project is still in its infancy, but if you’re interested, check it out!

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