It’s always good to know there is the community behind us helping to spot problems and suggesting the ways of improvement. This community has become pretty active and I spend about an hour daily reviewing and answering posts on our forum. That’s really nice, and I would like to say thank you from the Team for your valuable comments and advices. Thank you!

This week’s release is mainly aimed at removing glitches and annoyances. Yes, I would call it polishing, but it’s not that final polishing we do before the main release, it’s regular polishing to make our lives better. We still have a long way to go towards the Big One and new extremely useful features are planned for it, so don’t worry, it will be something delicious as usually. Now let me briefly outline what’s new and what’s fixed in this week’s build.

There were lots of reports on Pin command problems (thanks, Marcus): it didn’t work in the image view, there was no keyboard shortcut for it, it wasn’t disabled when there was no article selected etc. Did you notice the past tense? Good, because everything on this list is a thing of the past.

As we’ve got the native browser support in the previous release, we decided to move it one step forward in this one and explore e-mail program integration a bit. Today we added ‘E-mail This Link’ command (thanks, rahlquist) which opens your e-mail program window and lets you write a letter with the name of the article in the subject and the link in the body prepopulated. I personally started using it immediately to send great links I discover to my wife (who is in the next room, BTW). The other related enhancement is the command to send a letter to the author of a feed (thanks, Marjolein). It is available from the feed properties dialog and works only if the author field has e-mail address in it.

These were only the major enhancements to the application. You can learn much more from our History of Changes page. Enjoy!

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

• BB - GUI: Feed home page link in preferences
• BB - GUI: Added keyboard shortcut for (un)pin ( ‘P’ )
• BB - GUI: Pin command is disabled when no article selected
• BB - GUI: Added Pin to picture view
• BB - GUI: Fixed showing duplicate feeds and articles in cleanup wizard
• BB - Sync: Synchronizing display type and mode
• BB - GUI: Fixed adding extra ‘T’ in the tagging window on Java 1.6
• BB - GUI: Fixed global SPACE shortcut on Java 1.6
• BB - GUI: Made Ctrl-Gray-Plus / Gray-Minus work
• BB - GUI: Added “Email This Link” command
• BB - GUI: Added command to send e-mail to author from feed properties
• FL: Integrated to BBS (optional) for extended feed meta-data discovery

As I mentioned the other day, we are going for more better expert guides. This time it’s my pleasure to tell you that D’Arcy Norman, an expert and quite prolific blogger, has agreed to curate our Expert Guide on “Edublogs.”

D’Arcy is a software developer at the Learning Commons, which is a service department at The University of Calgary. His current primary role is as a software developer on the Pachyderm project, but he also gets to spend some time playing with new technologies to support teaching and learning - including, but not limited to weblogs, wikis, podcasting, rss, and a few others.

Here’s a link to D’Arcy’s own blog, and a link to his BlogBridge Expert Guide on Edublogs! As you can see, D’Arcy thinks it’s cool to be a Topic Expert, and while he might not be comfortable being called an expert, anyone who is mentioned 440,000 times in Google must be something

Oh, and D’Arcy, I too would love to have you do a screencast of how you use BlogBridge.

Technorati Tags: feedlibrary, education

Just a quick note that the folks at Softpedia have reviewed BlogBridge and they like it. Check it out at: Download BlogBridge 3.0.1 - BlogBridge - The ultimate info-junkie system - Softpedia

We have been working hard (behind the scenes) on taking our BlogBridge Experts program to another level. Why? Because we get feedback often that people really appreciate the pointers to good feeds and blogs.

Most recently, Mike Rothman, of Security Incite has agreed to be the editor for our Expert Guide on Information Security. Here is the Information Security Expert Guide for your perusal. Check it out, there may be some sources there you haven’t heard about.

Yeah Mike himself is tickled to be included

Okay, now that you have your cool aggregator, what are you going to aggregate? Sure you have your favorite blogs and you don’t mind surfing around to find new stuff. Surfing is part of the fun. Yeah.

But rather than spend all day at the RGB altar, wouldn’t you rather be hiking an Arizona canyon or snorkeling in the Dry Tortugas? Or maybe even…napping?

Why search for what has already been discovered?

A lot of interesting people in the BlogBridge community are happy to share their discoveries. Take, for example, Mark Anderson, a well-known cartoonist. Maybe you’ve seen his work in the Wall Street Journal. His passion is political cartoons. A while back he emailed us and offered to put together a concise list of what he thinks are the smartest political cartoon blogs. It’s an awesome list that you can install on BlogBridge for yourself. So now, if you are interested in cartoons, you don’t have to run around searching–you can use Mark’s list and revise, adjust, expand it for yourself.

Mark is one of BlogBridge’s “experts.” There are many more and they’re willing to share their discoveries with you.

No other aggregator comes with “recommended reading” created by experts who are genuinely passionate, enthusiastic and committed to their subjects.

We’re always adding to the BlogBridge universe of guides—suggestions welcome, although we won’t promise you’ll see the guide of your dreams instantly available. It takes time to coax some experts out of hiding. Speaking of which, if you an expert on something—would you like to develop a guide? We share many guides with our readers and if they’re good, they get to be BlogbBidge expert guides. (Read more about why you should write a guide here—you’d be surprised at what’s in it for you.)

The Guides are what give BlogBridge its super-powers. Our Guides are not computer-generated lists. This is real advice. Good stuff by people who know what they’re talking about.

Many people like to support open source projects like BlogBridge. We are a band (a small band) of committed people (who should be committed) who’ve been working on BlogBridge for a couple of years now. Yes our flagship product BlogBridge is indeed free to users and the source code is available. We do need to make a living though so you will see various products and services that we actually charge for. But the heart and soul of BlogBridge is free and open source!

Yeah, I know everyone says this. BlogBridge is designed for people who need to follow literally hundreds of feeds as part of their jobs. Sometimes I say it’s the aggregator for professionals.

Journalists, PR folks, researchers of all kinds. These are people who really have to follow a tremendous amount of information that is constantly percolating in feeds (blogs and other kinds of feeds) and can’t afford to miss even a single mention of their client or other topic of interest. Clearly they can’t read all that information but they have to read some of it and monitor all of it.

So when we say BlogBridge handles hundreds of feeds, this refers not only to reading them, but also managing them, searching them, placing alerts on them, publishing reading lists based on them. It’s a big deal.

Seriously. This is not complicated. Download. Subscribe to a guide or two or three and you’re good to go. Add your favorite feeds. Delete others. Mix and match. If that feels complicated, don’t worry—we’re here to help. Just email us.

After a while, some but not all of you might enjoy experimenting with some of BlogBridge’s more exotic features and getting funky with RSS. BlogBridge is incredibly powerful and has all kinds of unexpected and unusual abilities just waiting for you to discover them. And if you build something cool that you think BlogBridge should incorporate, we’d love to hear about it.

Also, BlogBridge comes with all kinds of support from FAQs for beginners to user groups for power-users. Just check out the support tab on our home page. If you can’t find what you need, let us know and we’ll try to help you out.

Mac, Linux, Windows—we can do that. Not many RSS aggregators can say that Why, you ask?

Why indeed. Because we believe in access, democracy, and the free flow of information. Because we think people should have really good tools to navigate this huge exuberant experiment we call the World Wide Web. Because whether you are a student with a Mac or a granny with an older HP, a prisoner, a fat cat, a Bulgarian accountant, or the CEO of a white-hot start-up, it should not matter what kind of operating system or computer you have. Good tools should be useful for everyone. It’s just plain wrong to build great stuff for one platform.

Also, if we can toot our own horn for a moment—lots of users in the Unix world have told us that BlogBridge is the best RSS feed reader available on Linux, period. (Read some of their quotations here.) Of course, on certain other platforms we do have some worthy (and some non-free) competition but even there we’ve also developed quite a following. Why? Because, with BlogBridge, you definitely get more than an aggregator. You get the ideas and guidance of real human beings.

And by the way, let’s say you use Windows at the office and a Mac at home and Unix when you go to the lab: if you use different computers at different times of the day, BlogBridge can synchronize your feeds. No one else can do that.

Not surprisingly, BlogBridge is also Open Source.

Read more about our cross-platform capabilities here:
List of relevant blog posts:

Data Recovery provides recovery service on a full range of hard disk drives including IDE and SATA for all makes and models of laptops and notebooks.