What if you have several reading lists published? In other words, lets say you have 3 different guides, each of which is published as a reading list. As you know, BlogBridge will give you three separate Reading List URLs pointing to an OPML file.

For example, I have two BlogBridge Reading Lists, “Pito’s Favorites“, “Java” and “Blogging and Bloggers” In general you can access a BlogBridge Reading List with a URL that looks like this:

http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/<usernumber>/readinglistname.

In my case, my <usernumber> is 291. You will have a different number.

3 Guides, 3 Reading Lists, 3 OPML Urls… But what if you wanted just one?

As of today, you can get all your published reading lists as one big fat opml by linking to http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/<usernumber>.opml.

So for example, mine are at: http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/291.opml

This has lots of interesting applications — really any application which can read OPML could use this. For example:

• Web access to BlogBridge: Import your published reading lists into Rojo or BlogLines to get vanilla web access to your feeds.
• Do some Grazin’: Use Grazr to graze around your published reading lists, for example, click here.

Thanks to Kathleen Gilroy for inspiring this idea with her post to our forum!

Technorati Tags: OPML, readinglists

We give and we take away.

With this release BlogBridge gets a really cool search capability.

I didn’t realize how much I missed it until now that I have it, I use it all the time. Check out the screenshot to the left, and of course download BlogBridge and play with it (see the instructions below.)

We modeled our search somewhat after Mac OS X Spotlight Search. As you can see in the shot on the left, you type in text in the box and as you type the results are displayed.

There are a bunch of controls for the display and filtering of the search. There is also a simple pattern language allowing more than straight text. As I said, instead of reading about it, go try it: Tools/Search.

So that’ what we gave. What did we take away?

Two things, both of which we hope you will agree are improvements. First of all, the discovery feature has been greatly simplified. No more menu commands, dialog boxes or preferences. There is a single setting on a Guide: “Scan new articles for links to other Feeds.”

When it’s on, BlogBridge will highlight links in an article: greenish if they are to a blog you are already subscribed to and reddish to a blog you haven’t seen before. Hover over the link for more info. Right click and “Subscribe to Feed”; if you want. A really handy way to see what your favorite bloggers are reading. Short and sweet.

Second thing: instead of 5 inscrutable little blinking icons at the bottom right of the screen, we have two icons: one indicating disk activity and one indicating network activity (as well as online/offline status.) Both have really nice tooltips to give further details.

There are of course lots and lots of other little fixes and goodies in this release. For that please refer to the edit history.

For the first time with this weekly development release we are giving you platform specific installers in addition to the standard Java Web Start.

Here is where to get the latest Weekly Development release:

Java Web Start (works on all platforms)

Enjoy and let us know what you like, and, what you dislike!

• OPML: Updated the format of exported OPML
• Net: Improved Atom 1.0 parsing
• Net: Improved discovery engine
• GUI: Added more guide icons
• GUI: Search feature
• GUI: Guides and feeds listing improvements
• GUI: Discovery features simplified
• GUI: Toolbar greatly simplified
• GUI: Status bar greatly simplified
• Core: Added ability to distribute weeklies as EXE/DMG/TGZ
• Core: Improved keywords-based search
• Core: Fixed purge functionality problems
• Sync: Fixed restoration of feed view type from the service
• Sync: Added preferences synchronization

This is a small reminder that we are having another super-informal-geeky-but-not-exclusively-geeks geek dinner. Here is a link to the original announcement.

Who is we, again? Bela Labovitch, Adam Green and me. We are fortunate that the folks at Top Ten Sources and RSS Labs are again letting use their space. Thanks!

What happens at this thing? Well this is the second one that we are organizing. Basically we just hang out, casually munch on cheap food and compare notes on stuff that people are working on.

Everyone is welcome, and people who came last time: invite along a friend who didn’t come or didn’t know about it. Really! It would be nice to have new faces. Even if you are not really a geek. In fact I have it on good authority that some definite-non-geeks will be coming

There’s no agenda. We might go around and show off folks latest creations, or not. At any rate we will provide projection facilities for you to use. But this is not primarily a demo-rama, it’s more of a network-o-rama.

Here are the coordinates again:

When: March 29, Wednesday, 6:30pm to 9:30pm

Where: 66 Church Street, Cambridge (near Fire and Ice)

Topics of discussion: Web 2.0, RSS, OPML 2.0, AJAX, Ruby, Mashups, Web Services, Startups, etc.

To RSVP, click here

Technorati Tags: geekdinner

Gada.be is an interesting and very unusual kind of meta-search engine, which was developed some months ago by Lockergnomer Chris Pirillo.

I came across this post today from Chris, talking about the connection between OPML and Gada.be. Chris says:

““One might not be able to subscribe to OPML today, but one can easily import OPML into one’s aggregator with relative ease. Now, a smart aggregator (like FeedDemon) will allow you to pick and choose which feeds in an OPML file get imported - and when you have several engines against which you wish to search, auto-generated OPML documents come in handy” (from “What is OPML?”)

It turns out, drum roll please, that BlogBridge is an aggregator, available today, free for gosh sakes, cross platform no less, which in fact does let you subscribe to an OPML, TODAY!

Actually we’ve had that feature for a few months now and, back in the lab actually have cooked up the next wrinkle in this story which we are about to start implementing in BlogBridge (actually with BlogBridge as it looks like it will be a new product. Wink, Wink.)

The screenshots to the left illustrate the Reading List feature and how I’d use it with Gada.be.  All it takes is to create a Guide, indicate on the Reading List tab the URL of the Gada.be search result, and click OK. Bingo!

But the coolest thing is that the OPMLReading List  is re-fetched periodically and so the resulting collection of result sites will update as  Gada.be discovers new places to get results. This is true dynamic subscription to OPML-based reading lists no matter where they live!

Technorati Tags: gadabe, lockergnome, readinglists

Here is the first result of your feedback on features to, as we say, “ditch”.

Discovery is a feature that is quite cool but many don’t use or didn’t understand it. So we are radically simplifying it, and keeping the core of the core only.

There will be a single Guide property: “Scan new articles for links to other feeds” (see the Guide menu, Properties… command)

When enabled, BlogBridge will highlight links to other Feeds. A green highlight will mean that it’s a Feed you already are subscribed to, and a red highlight will mean that it’s a Feed you’ve not seen before.

Hovering over the link will display a tooltip with all kinds of information about the Feed that we’ve been able to figure out.

If it’s a new Feed for you, right clicking on the link will let you subscribe to that feed (”Subscribe to this Feed”.)

That’s all.

The Discover commands will be gone, the Show Discovered Feeds dialog (which was actually quite nice) will be gone, and several obscure preferences will be gone.

Hope y’all like it!

“OPML Camp” is happening! The date  is May 20-21, and the location is Harvard Law School, yes, here in the Boston area. Ok, it’s almost walking distance from my house

If you are geeky enough to know and care about OPML then you should definitely consider coming. Check it out!

Technorati Tags: OPML

(I guess this is in the “shameless self promotion department”) As you might imagine, I pay attention when people write about BlogBridge, good or bad. Here are some recent nice mentions:

John Patrick in his always interesting PatrickWeb recommends BlogBridge “especially if you like to keep track of a large number of blogs“. You should definitely add PatrickWeb to the blogs you watch!

Vivek recently discovered BlogBridge and it is now his reader of choice. He writes a good analysis, but wants more: “newsreaders have to effectively summarise and present information from a large number of feeds”. Couldn’t agree more. We’re working on it!

Gauthampai wrote a great post about BlogBridge: “I changed my RSS Reader.” He’s written other interesting bits about the technology. check them out!

In an interesting post about RSS, Jay mentions a set of aggregators, and BlogBridge as his new fav!

Thanks to all our users for their continued support!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge

A couple of posts that are quite interesting: one from Merlin Mann at 43 Folders and then further commentary on  that one by Jack Vinson. If you haven’t seen them, check them out! Here is Jack’s synopsis:

There’s two significant features I’ve been wishing for in my beloved newsreader, NetNewsWire [snip]

• Per-feed expirations that let me select how long I want to subscribe to the feed.
• Smarter Dinosaurs let you display any feeds that haven’t seen any activity over a period of time that you choose.

You should really read the whole posts to get the gist. Here are a few comments:

We’ve contemplated a simpler version of per-feed expirations based on some user suggestions. How about if you simply had the ability to mark any new feed as “probation” or “trial.”

I think this is really the underlying motivation for the per-feed expirations, and simpler. Any probation feed would have a little icon (a hangman?) At the end of a settable period of time, BlogBridge would simply pop up a list of expired probation feeds and ask the user which ones should be deleted, saved, or kept on probation. I think this is a simpler approach which would work better.

As far as the Smarter Dinosaurs, BlogBridge as a Feed Cleanup Wizard which is already quite smart:

You can specify any or all of these:

• Feeds that haven’t updated in the last x days.
• Feeds that I haven’t clicked on in the last X days.
• Feeds that have a minimum “BlogStarz” rating.

As you change these parameters, BlogBridge lists the feeds that match, and upon confirmation, those get deleted. By the way, Jack, you can limit this cleanup to a specific Guide if you like.

There are a couple of cool refinements in Merlin’s idea, which is that the Cleanup Wizard automatically gets run periodically, which I really like. Oh, and Merlin, BlogBridge is free, and runs very nicely on Mac OS X! Check it out!

Technorati Tags: aggregators, RSS, RSSAlley

With all this talk of ‘the big delete’ don’t think that we are sitting around!

From feedback we’ve gotten in the past, and common sense, we are about to fill the last remaining hole in the base BlogBridge feature set, namely Search.

We’re doing something simple but we think very nice and powerful, modeled to some extent after Spotlight on the Mac. You will be able to search the text in all guides, feeds and articles, and simply navigate to them. That’s all.

Actually, there’s one more thing: you’ll be able to limit the scope to just Guide names, just Feed names, Just article text, or just unread Article text.

Click on the thumbnail to see a mockup of what’s being built even as we speak!

Technorati Tags: search