Yes, sports fans, we’ve got a new release for you, BlogBridge 5.0! The next time you run BlogBridge it will automatically offer you a chance to update to BlogBridge 5.0.

N.B. Starting with BlogBridge 5.0 and the introduction of the BlogBridge service plans we’ve decided that it would be fair ask our users for a very small subscription fee to help us pay the bills. We still have the totally free option, with (currently) a limit of 300 feeds and 2 synchs per day. You can read the details in on the BlogBridge service plans page.

We remain committed to BlogBridge Desktop as a Free and Open Source project. This has always been and continues to be a labor of love. We hope if you like and use BlogBridge you will decide to continue to support our work.

Now to what’s new. The major new capabilities are around the Post to Blog capabilities, but actually there are several other new goodies.The most significant is that the new BlogBridge Service is now generally available, supporting the new “Post to Blog” commands. Depending on the your subscription plans, you will see this new command enabled, both on the context menu and on the Articles menu.

Also, for Publishing plan subscribers, we have a powerful new “Hide Duplicates” feature for SmartFeeds:

Yes, I did announce and describe it extensively a little while ago, but up to now it was only available to our “weekly” development release. For more details, take a look at this description of the new BlogBridge Service Plans. You may also be interested to learn how to Get Started with the BlogBridge Service.

Another fairly significant change is that before BlogBridge 5.0, the signup and access to the BlogBridge Service was through BlogBridge Desktop application (the original and still centerpiece of our offerings.)

From now on, new users sign up via this web site’s “My BlogBridge” link. If you don’t have a BlogBridge service account, get one now! While we’ve started to charge for some of the services, note that we still have a totally free level of service, which will suffice for many of our users.

But wait! There’s more new (from 4.0.1) capabilities in BlogBridge 5.0:

• Greatly improved startup speed and overall stability
• Integration with Firefox and Safari (can be registered as the RSS feed handler)
• No polling of hidden feeds
• Pin command available directly in Search results
• Pin status available when creating SmartFeeds
• Post to Blog for Base level subscribers
  • WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, JRoller Support
  • Minimal, brief and Full quoting of source article
• Post to Blog for Pub level subscribers
  • HTML and Rich Text mode editing
  • Smart duplicate removal in Smart Feeds
  • Post to multiple blogs in one click
  • Set a category to post to each blog
  • Set date of post
• GoogleNews SmartFeed

I won’t list all the smaller things - here is the complete history of all the changes from 4.0.1 to 5.0.