• BB - Core: No polling of hidden feeds
• BB - GUI: Added a validator to the Proxy Exclusions field
• BB - GUI: Changed Left/Right keyboard shortcut to cycle between all three view modes
• BB - GUI: Added Ctrl-Left/Right to do the same for all articles in a feed
• BB - GUI: Complete SmartFeed dialog rework (add view modes)
• BB - GUI: Checkbox lists support spacebar-selection now
• BB - GUI: When dragging a guide the list will scroll up and down as expected
• FL - GUI: Grouping folder names in selectors (my feeds / other’s feeds)
• FL - GUI: Showing the number of items in the list of the owned feeds (user profile)

This question comes up every so often. Most recently in Linux Insider, where they ask: “… does opening the window to RSS also let in harmful malware and viruses? Some security vendors are beginning to address the threat.” (thanks for the pointer, Marjolein)

I’ve heard this question before, and I am not sure I understand exactly where they are coming from. I believe the point is that RSS feeds can contain something like an HTML subset which we know sometimes can contain malware.

I believe this is a bit alarmist.

I haven’t done an exhaustive study but I believe that aggregators in general don’t just display the HTML found in the feeds without pre-processing. Why? Because in our direct experience this HTML can be quite random and to have a well behaved aggregator you just about must pre-process it. That’s my opinion.

p.s. I addressed this before, in the BlogBridge FAQs:

“[snip...] In general though I think it’s much more likely that malicious javascript affects pages displayed in the Web Browser, so the focus correctly should remain there.” (from BlogBridge FAQ: “Do Blog Feeds carry a security risk?”

Congratulations to our friends at Grazr! I heard from Adam (Green) that yesterday Grazr.com announced that they had received a round of financing, and at the same time that they were announcing the availability of Grazr 1.1. Those guys are doing some really interesting work, you should go check them out.

Easy interoperability with BlogBridge too. Take a look at the Grazr widget below. It is a nice display and navigator for (in this example) the Expert Guide on Negotiation that we announced yesterday. It took me like 1 minute to do that. Sweet!

We’re lucky to have Dr. Joshua Weiss of Harvard University join us as a BlogBridge Topic Expert on Negotiation.

In fact, Dr. Weiss is currently the Associate Director of the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard University, and he also does a podcast called the Negotiation Tip of the Week in which he discusses many ideas and concepts related to the subject of negotiation.

Check out his expert guide to see some of the interesting new blogs that Josh is introducing to us!

I just came across (with a SmartFeed, natch) a post titled “My Ideal RSS reader” It would be presumptuous of me to suggest BlogBridge, but for all of you who have appreciated our efforts in building and rapidly continuing to improve BlogBridge, it would be great if you post something to that blog. Thanks in advance!

p.s. In this world of political correctness I have to admit that I stopped and thought whether the above suggestion ‘crosses the line’ in any way. I decided that since this blog is explicitly about BlogBridge and for BlogBridge users, it was fine.

Adam Posey writes a nice review of BlogBridge

“[...snip]This is a desktop app that is the most full featured RSS reader I have ever used, it’s for the web 2.0 junkie who REALLY likes their RSS. I highly recommend it to anyone that really keeps track of anything morethan 5 feeds, no, I recommend it to everyone.[...snip]“

Read the whole review here: “My new favorite RSS reader. (BlogBridge)”