This is just amusing. We will be rolling out a new web site in the next week or two and one of the things I’ve been looking for is a nice looking ‘badge’ for our new expert guides to put on their own web sites and blogs.

As you may know we are a low budget operation here, and so I was looking for a graphic designer who might be able to do something quick and dirty (but really cool and pretty of course.)

So, what do you think about the seal to the left? Any good?

Nah, it was generated by a really fun little application, “Official Seal Generator“:

“Welcome to the Official Seal Generator. Enter some text, choose a border and an emblem, pick your colors, and click the ‘Go’ button. An Official Seal will be generated for you. Collect ‘em, trade ‘em, put ‘em on your website, or e-mail ‘em to your friends.”

Amusing, eh? Check it out here.

Oh by the way, if you are a graphic artist and would like to help us out, we’d be super grateful!

Technorati Tags: cool, cooltool, funny

Minimize to System Tray is cool. The weekly development build we release today will let some of you check if you feel that’s a true statement. 

Some of you… because to get this cool feature you need to have Java 6 installed. By the way Java 6 is technically still in beta, but in our experience it works just fine.

Of course,  Mac OS X users even don’’t need this as they have the nice “dock” feature.

As for Linux users, we haven’t forgotten you! Support is in the works. And by the way, we would gracefully accept any help as you know that we are limited in man-power.

So, those of you using Windows and Java 6 can find two new options on the Advanced Preferences page:

• Show BlogBridge icon in system tray
• Minimize BlogBridge window to system tray

If you don’t see any of them, you’re either not on Windows or are not running Java 6

Continuing the saga of enhancements for Windows users, let me congratulate those of you who patiently posted requests to add native browser calling support.

No, we don’t have Internet Explorer embedded into BlogBridge (that would be too much), but we taught it to call your browser of choice, like any other native application.

When the browser is already running any links you click on in the BlogBridge will be opened in the background. Otherwise, the browser will be started for you.

The last important thing worth a mentioning is a new feed sorting mode: “More…Less Visits’.” You will find this in Preferences, under Feeds. It is our tip-of-the-hat to the world of “attention“.

Basically, BlogBridge counts how often you select your feeds. Usually you do this to read something and it indicates your interest in some feed. You can tell BlogBridge to sort the display of feeds by the number of visits to put the most interesting and most often visited feeds at the top of the list. Neat, isn’t it?

Hope you have a good time playing with this release!

If you are new to BlogBridge, you can get it installed by clicking on this  BlogBridge Development Release link.

Don’’t forget to share your thoughts and comments with us either in comments sections or on our forum.

• BB - GUI: Reworked some keyboard shortcuts (Mac)
• BB - GUI: Integrated native browser lancher (Windows)
• BB - GUI: Added minimizing to system tray (Windows)
• BB - GUI: Added ‘More … Less Visits’ feed sorting mode
• BBL: Changed OPML icon to the one by Chris Pirillo ( http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/06/30/opml-icon/ )
• BBL: Rebuilt thumbshots to use Amazon AST service
• BBL: Added automatic feed discovery helper to new/edit item page

One of my favorite podcasts (in fact the only one I listen to regularly is Geek News Central with Todd Cochrane.

The reason I like it so much is that Todd’s interests coincide quite well with mine, even the occasional bit about the space program or genealogy. But really mostly it’s what the name says, Geek News. Pointers to interesting geeky content on the web and Todd’s own unique perspective on it. Recommended!

[Ok, the preceding will look like a transparent suck-up given what follows, and it is, but it is also sincere ]

But why I am posting this on the BlogBridge site? I was listening to the August 15 edition of GNC. Turns out that Todd is a FeedDemon user, but is now starting to use his new MacBook Pro seriously and is looking for a feed reader for Mac that is at least as good.

See where this is going? Sure.

Well IMHO BlogBridge is the right choice for a user like Todd. Why?

• BlogBridge works just as well on Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux (I hear Todd uses all three regularly)
• BlogBridge free and open source (I hear Todd likes to support open source projects)
• If you use more than one computer then BlogBridge will synchronize your subscriptions across those computers (I bet Todd uses more than one computer.)
• BlogBridge is designed for people who need to follow hundreds and hundreds of feeds without breaking a sweat (Todd, hundreds of feeds? Check!)
• Comprehensive support of OPML: Dynamic subscriptions to OPML reading lists, as well as publishing of OPML reading lists directly from inside BlogBridge. (If he’s not doing this yet, he will.)
• Direct integration with lots of interesting services on the web like Technorati, del.icio.us, Flickr, and others (Maybe Todd should be publishing his attention stream with del.icio.us.)
• We have new releases every two weeks, and move forward quickly with cool features targeted at users who follow lots and lots of feeds.

Now Todd says he really likes FeedDemon’s tabbed browsing. We don’t have that yet but let me respectfully suggest that BlogBridge’s other charms more than make up for that. For example, use BlogBridge’s del.icio.us integration to tag all posts in del.icio.us for reference later and then open them all up in FireFox. This has the additional cool benefit of giving us Todd’s attention stream.

Note to BlogBridge fans. Let’s tell Todd why he should start using BlogBridge across all his systems.

Technorati Tags: geeknewscentral, Geeky

This is a nice little dissertation on one of the micro technical challenges in building an aggregator. It has to do with the detection of duplicates in an rss feed.

The article called “RSS Duplicate Detection” goes through the challenges of ‘correctly’ detecting whether two posts are identical; you can read his conclusion that there is no provably “correct” behavior.

By the way if you wonder why there would be duplicates in a feed, here’s a very common scenario.

The aggregator polls the RSS feed once, displaying the resultant posts, and storing them in some kind of archive, so they can be displayed again without polling again (as well as so that they can collect the posts over time.)

An hour or several later, the aggregator polls again, and lo and behold the feed has been updated, so it is fetched again. But in fact only 1 new item was posted in the interrim. So the feed contains that new item and then a stream (repeating) of the same items fetched the first time.

The question: how is the aggregator to figure out that that single post is “new”? Somehow it will compare it with the ones already there, asking the question: “is this post a duplicate of one already there?”

Voila. If the aggregator answers that question ‘incorrectly‘ then one of two things happen: if it thinks it’s new but it wasn’t, then the user sees a duplicate, and writes some hate mail to me. If it thinks it’s not new but it was actually new, then the user sees that a post is ‘missing’ and writes some hate mail to me.

So knowing when two posts are ‘the same’ is critical. Unfortunately there is a right answer, and is, “two posts are the same if the user thinks they are the same and vice vesa.”

“Once again, I’m a happy BlogBridge user! While FeedReader 3 is a nice application, the lack of centralized syncronzation services makes it very tedious to use for people who use multiple computers on a daily basis.” (from H0bbel)

“I’m also impressed by the fact that the developers behind BlogBridge actually took the time to both comment and send me emails regarding this issue, trying to figure out what was going on. Not that I actually had anything useful to report back to them, as the issue isn’t present in the weekly builds. Another very nice “feature” of the weekly builds, is that you can run it without actually installing it. When you download it, it’s basically just a .jar file that gets executed within your Java environment. Very nice, as this also guarantees that you get updated code from the developers each time you run it.” (from H0bbel)

We are analyzing the possibility of adding direct comment support within BlogBridge. What might this mean? Here are some possibilities.

• If a blog or other feed allows commenting, then permit the user to post a comment to an article directly from within BlogBridge
• If an Article already has one or more comments, allow the user to view the comments directly from within BlogBridge

Help us out here! How valuable would this be to YOU? How would you like the feature to work? Do you suggest we do this? Please post your responses as comments (!) to this, or send us an email at support@blogbridge.com. Thanks!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, RSS

It’s Friday and we are releasing another scheduled version of BlogBridge — version 3.01. It’s the Weekly Development build which is feature complete and relatively stable. Give it a whirl and tell your friends about us!

What’s new in this week’s version of BlogBridge? We need to say that this release was full of cosmetic changes, like showing shortcuts in the main menu, and changing layout of Reading List addition dialog. However, there are also some fresh additions to play with.

Subscribe to Reading List command was added to Guides menu. It gives you a quick way of subscribing to a Reading List through adding it to some existing Guide or creating a new one. Yes, and we have our suggestion picker there too!

Most of you dealing with secured feeds know that sometimes BlogBridge keeps nagging to enter the password you don’t know. You will be able to tell it directly that you “don’t know” the answer and it will remember this. Also, there’s the command in Tools menu to forget all passwords.

Before now it wasn’t quite clear which of the Reading Lists in your subscription list were still active and which of them had died long ago. Now we show dead Lists in gray (see the list of Reading Lists in the Guide properties dialog).

The last update is the ability to enter your existing account information during the installation, so that the next time you will be installing BlogBridge somewhere, it’ll be easy to start synchronizing with your existing account right away.

Check out our history of changes for a brief summary of what’s in this release.

Use the Java Web Start launcher to download and start the updated version.

Enjoy!

• BB - GUI: Showing shortcuts in menus
• BB - GUI: Allowing the user to enter existing account details during setup
• BB - GUI: Added ‘Subscribe to Reading List’ command
• BB - GUI: Added ‘Pinned Only’ view mode
• BBL: Showing feed preview
• BBL: Improved cookie crumbs navigation control
• BBL: Some cosmetic fixes
• BBL: Bring user back to the page where he was after logging in
• BBL: OPML import enhancements
• BBL: Showing URLs for dynamic feeds and folders
• BBL: Warning user when converting manual folder into OPML folder
• BBL: Importing tags from OPML
• BBL: Added field in user profile for blog / site address

Just a quick reminder that tomorrow morning, Thursday, August 10th, at 10:00am, EST, we will be having 30 minute skypecast covering BlogBridge and our Feed Library.

Here’s what’s up:

• 10:00am Start
• 10:05am BlogBridge 3.0 - What’s new
• 10:15am Feed Library - What is it and what’s new
• 10:20am Questions and discussion
• 10:30am Closing

I’d like to ask everyone to come and participate in this FREE conference call. All you need is your FREE Skype account, which of course all of you already have!

Click to see the details of the Skypecast on the Skype web site!

Here are some links that I will be using:

• BlogBridge 3.0 announcement
• Growl notification tool for Mac OS X
• BlogBridge History of changes
• BlogBridge Topic Guides
• Intro BlogBridge Feed Library
• Overview of Feed Library Features
• BlogBridge t-shirt