A Guide is simply a collection of Feeds which have been grouped together for your convenience. Generally all the Feeds in a Guide are related in one way or another. They might all be comics, or all be about Politics, or be about Nuclear Physics. You are always looking at the Feeds of the current Guide, which is the one who is clicked or selected in the Guide Panel. Many operations apply to a whole Guide, for example, you can delete a Guide, create a Guide, import a Guide, mark all the articles in a Guide as being read, etc.
In general the process on Mac is the same as all the other platforms (see xxx) The BlogBridge working directory is called .bb and on your Mac the path is: /Users/ps/.bb/ where ‘ps’ are your initials or user name. This path is also known as ~/.bb/ This is the only directory that BlogBridge reads or writes other than the Java directories of course.
You will be asked to supply a working email account, and your name, and a password. With that BlogBridge will periodically send the names of your Channel Guides, which Channels in each one, and what articles are read and unread. In addition some platform and performance statistics are collected. Other than your name and the email you supplied, no personal information of any kind is collected.
How come are you being so open about your plans? It’s a new way of doing things! We are appreciate the help we get from the community and want to be as transparent as possible.
Where can I get it? Depends on exactly what you want! You can run the latest Beta version or get all its source code for you to build and play with. Also we have a weekly (Friday) build that you can run if you want to be on the bleeding edge of the bleeding edge. Check out this page for all the details.
While you can’t create or host your own blog with BlogBridge, if you already have a blog, you can even use BlogBridge to create posts based on what you are reading.
You can keep up with the avalanche of information coming at you from the web over feeds of all sorts. You can read, sort, filter, subset, display, tag, and even re-publish using BlogBridge and the affiliated BlogBridge Service. Here are some more links to look at:
What kind of user is BlogBridge targetted at? RSS Feeds and Blogging are still fairly new, although we think very exciting new areas. We would like BlogBridge to be useful to users at all levels, including beginners. It is pretty difficult to make easy to use software, so we won’t get it right the first time, but our goal is a truly simple and fun to use application.
[Windows Only] I forgot to ask for desktop integration. Is it too late? No, there are just a few steps. Run an application called Java Web Start located on your Start Menu. You will see an icon for BlogBridge. Click on it, and then click the Application/Add Shortcuts command and you will get the shortcut to easily run BlogBridge in the future.
Note: Depending on what versions you are running, the Java Web Start program could be in several places. You can avoid the hassle of looking for it picking Run… from the Start menu and asking for “javaws” and pressing Ok, which is another easier way to run it.
[Windows Only] When I am installing BlogBridge, I get a question about “Desktop Integration” - what is that? You should answer “Yes” and request it. it’s a really scary and obscure way of asking you if you want to have a shortcut on your desktop to run BlogBridge again. (Of course it goes without saying that the message is coming from the Java system, and that we are not able to change it.)
