We’ve been happily using the (free) services of SourceForge.net from the start. However lately they have had several very worrysome outages, making our source code temporarily inaccessible. So we’ve been internally discussing whether we ought to move our project to another home. Here is the result of my research so far…

I looked into Mozilla. It has a good reputation and is well known. BlogBridge doesn’t qualify because it is not a Mozilla related project. There is also MozDev, which is closely related, however the same restriction applies.

Because BlogBridge is a Java project, the next pointer that comes to mind is Java.Net. I am not exactly sure whether Java.net is a Sun supported site or otherwise funded, but it looks quite legitimate and active. When I went to create a new project there as a test, the form submission failed with an inscrutable error, which of course spooked me somewhat. But it’s still on the list.

I also came across Savannah, which is a GNU related site. It looks like a possibility, given that our code is GPL licensed. I need to research this further. Assembla looks like a hosted, more developer oriented variant of Basecamp. One advantage it has is that Subversion integrated.

If anyone out there has experience with or insight about these options, or other options that I should consider, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you, the sooner the better!

Technorati Tags: java.net, sourceforge

Hey, thanks for stopping by! And welcome. Please try out BlogBridge, it’s totally and fully free! It’s useful. It runs on your computer (Mac? Yes; Windows? Yes!; Linux??? Yeah!)

If you have any questions or problems at all, please stop by our support forum or send us an email. Operators are standing by.

And for the rest of you, wondering what this is about? It’s about an interesting article (click on the image to the left) from Jeremy Wagstaff covering the problem that BlogBridge was created to try and solve: “With So Much to Keep Track of, Here’s a Little Help in Narrowing the Options”.

Here’s a snippet:

“Blogs, or Web-based journals, have proved wildly popular; the total number out there is doubling every six months, according to Technorati Inc., a company that tracks more than 35 million of them. And this creates a problem: How can anyone find what they want among all that information?” (click on the image above to read the whole thing.)

Jeremy is especially interested in Reading Lists, something you know I’ve written quite a bit about in the context of BlogBridge:

“Instead of subscribing to a single feed, you subscribe to an expert’s Guide or Reading List. Conversely, if you felt you were an expert on Squirrel Waterskiing, you could share your list of exciting blogs and other feeds on the subject as a Reading List, allowing other Squirrel Waterskiing enthusiasts to download it into their BlogBridge program. [...] Nothing too revolutionary here [...] But one of the neat tricks with BlogBridge is that any Reading List you subscribe to can be dynamically updated. If the expert in any particular field decides to replace one feed with another, or add a feed, those changes will automatically be reflected in your Guide.”

Reading Lists of course are based centrally on a format called OPML. By coincidence OPML Camp is on tomorrow, in Cambridge, Mass, USA, where we will be discussing and exploring all the interesting applications of OPML. See you there?

Technorati Tags: OPML, opmlcamp

It’s Friday and we release another BlogBridge Weekly Development Release: Version 2.19. This version features several tasty things and here I would like to highlight some.

The most noticable and nice of them is Activity Alerts. Activity Alerts is our cool name for different event notifications given when you don’t see the application window (it’’s either minimized or otherwise hidden). We opened the season by reporting two kinds of events: when new articles arrive and when new feeds are added to the reading lists you are subscribed to.

Notifications itself appear in a platform-specific way. On Mac OS X you need Growl (http://www.growl.info/) to see some nice balloons. Growl is a handy Mac OS X utility that does, well, notifications.

On Windows and Linux a small BlogBridge icon appears in the notifications area and a popup message is displayed near it. Please note that Windows and Linux users need at least Java 6 (which is still in Beta state at the moment) to see any notifications and notifications related options.

This is due to the fact that we always need some cross-platform way of doing things as we have to support many different systems and the only way to stay independent of any native code injections is to use only standard means.

You can enable or disable notifications using global preferences (Notifications tab).

Look to this new tab as we add more notification options. By the way, if you don’t see the tab, you can’t have notifications because of your Java version. Sorry.

Every Guide also has this tab where you can allow the engine monitor this Guide for new feeds and feeds in it for new articles or disallow to do so.

The other small enahncement is that we added an intersting new link (http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/public.opml). It lists all public reading lists our users have published. It’s the shortest and the easiest way to expose your lists. Now when you publish your list in BlogBridge you can set a “public” flag and the record about your reading list will show up in that small directory (By default, all reading lists are marked as private and none of the previously published ones will be exposed, so don’’t worry.)

Enjoy the updates and let us know what you think! We are very open to comments and suggestions as usual.

If you are curious and courageous, Click here to download and run the latest Weekly Development Release (on any platform).

• Sync: Public / Private Reading Lists publishing
• GUI: Reworked and unified recommendations (starting points, experts)
• GUI: Activity alerts (system tray on Windows and Linux, Growl on Mac)

BlogBridge uses OPML extensively. We recently updated our OPML support to conform with OPML 2.0 also.

The OPML spec isn’t frozen yet, but we needed to update some things we were doing and decided, why not follow the spec? If we need to tweak it further we can do that.

Of course when doing that it’s important to pay close attention to what everyone else is doing. There’s a useful concept that has been called “Postel’s Law“, which basically says be strict in what you generate and liberal in what you accept.” (See Wikipedia about Jon Postel)

Even though we’ve updated our OPML support to conform with 2.0, we still continue to accept all variants of OPML that we’ve encountered in the wild. In other words, if our OPML fails to be imported by application X, or we fail to import OPML from application Y, we consider it OUR bug.

Check here for a write-up with more details about how we use OPML, our name-space, and extensions to the type= attribute.

Technorati Tags: OPML, opmlcamp

BlogBridge uses OPML for various purposes. This FAQ gives a high level overview of our use of the format.

We intend to conform to the OPML 2.0 standard, and accordingly use an XML namespace (”bb:”) for attributes which go beyond the standard. Our namespace is bound to the following URI: http://blogbridge.com/ns/2006/opml.

In order to understand BlogBridge’s use of OPML all you need to know is the format and usage of <outline> tags. It’s where the action is.

Standard Feeds:

Here are the attributes on <outline> tags that represent BlogBridge Feeds and what each means.

• type = “rss”
• text - title of the feed
• xmlUrl - data URL of the feed
• htmlUrl - site URL

• bb:rating - rating of the feed in range [1;5]
• bb:customTitle - custom title of the feed
• bb:customCreator - custom author name
• bb:customDescription - custom feed description
• bb:tags - comma-separated list of tags associated with the feed
• bb:tagsDescription - short tags description
• bb:tagsExtended - extended tags description
• bb:disabled - disabled state flag

Not exposed to the outer world

• bb:readArticles - comma-separated list of read articles’ hash codes in hex
• bb:limit - purge limit (number of articles to leave in the feed)
• bb:viewType - type of the feed view (0 - text, 1 - images, 2 - links)

SmartFeeds:There are two kinds of SmartFeeds, the ones that perform a query across feeds inside BlogBridge and the ones that are simple facades in front of existing services on the web such as del.icio.us and Technorati.

Here are the attributes on <outline> tags that are used for SmartFeeds that query across Feeds inside BlogBridge:

• type = “search”
• text - title of the feed
• title - the same as text (for backward compatibility with previous clients when title attribute was in OPML spec)
• bb:query - query string in internal BB format
• bb:rating - rating of the feed in range [1;5]
• bb:limit - purge limit (number of articles to leave in the feed)

Here are the attributes on <outline> tags that are simple facades. Note that we use type=”rss” so that other aggregators can import these as if they were regular Feeds:

• type = “rss”
• text - title of the feed
• title - the same as text (for backward compatibility with previous clients when title attribute was in OPML spec)
• xmlUrl - data URL of the feed (when applicable)
• bb:rating - rating of the feed in range [1;5]
• bb:queryType - type of query (0 - feedster, 1 - flickr, 2 - technorati, 3-5 - reserved, 6 - findory, 7 - del.icio.us, 8 - connotea, 9 - amazon books, 10 - google blogsearch)
• bb:queryParam - string search parameter

Not exposed to the outer world

• bb:readArticles - comma-separated list of read articles’ hash codes in hex
• bb:limit - purge limit (number of articles to leave in the feed)
• bb:viewType - type of the feed view (0 - text, 1 - images, 2 - links)

Technorati Tags: OPML, opmlcamp

OPML stands for Outline Processing Markup Language, a format designed by Dave Winer which has become the de-facto standard within aggregators to exchange subscription list. You can see a snippet of OPML to the left.

Actually OPML can be used for a lot more then exchanging subscription lists.  BlogBridge uses OPML extensively, although users don’t need to know or care about it.

In BlogBridge we use OPML in the following ways:

• Import and Export between different versions of BlogBridge
• Import and Export with other aggregators
• Publishing Reading Lists
• Subscribing to Reading Lists
• Much of the communication formats between BlogBridge and the Blog Bridge service

Today we release another BlogBridge version � version 2.18 — that, according to the history of changes, is mainly maintenance release. However, all fixes and small enhancements are usability-focused and should noticeable with unarmed eye.

The most significant of them is attempt to reduce memory footprint of the application. Obviously, no desktop application should grab half of your system memory even if it�s as well-packed with miracles as BlogBridge is. It�s still weekly development release and things can be not so smooth, but still, keep an eye on it and notice your impressions. We would love to hear about them. Don�t forget that we have forum open 24×7.

Other fixes are less cardinal, yet interesting. It�s already became a good tradition to enhance the way articles are rendered. As we don�t have an opportunity to involve system browser component in this, we are bound to continuously polish what we have. Thanks to endless enthusiasm of Kevin and suggestions from all around the world (Thanks Tim!), admitedly, we do a great job on this front.

If you are an avid publisher who is using our fresh ping-upon-publishing functionality, you might notice that it doesn�t work sometimes. Yes, it didn�t work when guides were published with Full Synchronization, but worked perfect when one invoked �Only Save� command. This issue is also fixed. It works for both variants equally good now.

Tell us what you think and tell your friends what we do!

Click here to download and run the latest weekly development release (on any platform)!

• Core: Significant memory footprint reduction
• Core: Some speed improvements
• GUI: Fixed rendering images with unescaped spaces in URL’s
• Net: Fixed not pinging the service on publishing reading lists sometimes
• Net: Fixed parsing feeds with items source specified as xml:base plus relative links
• Sync: Added published lists pinging setting synchronization