You may not realize it but we are constantly scouring the web for people to add new and wonderful Expert Topic Guides to our library. I’m excited to be able to tell you about two new Guides for parents. (Who new that there were two ‘kinds’ of Mommy blogs?)

Both of these are by our new expert guide Jordan McCollum, who herself writes and maintains MamaBlogga: mom’s search for meaning. Read her bio because apparently other than her human family members she also seems to have one one obnoxious cat, cleverly named Whiskers

• Family Friendly Parent Blogs - Parent blogs (sometimes “mom/mommy blogs”) are famous for being detailing the achievements of children and triumphs in housework. Not these. These parents go beyond their day-to-day lives in an effort to connect with other people and make sense of the difficult journey that is parenthood. The Family-friendly Parent Blogs are mostly rated G or PG—stuff you wouldn’t mind your kids reading.
• Adult Parenting Blogs - The Adult Parenting Bloggers don’t hold back. For ‘adult’ language or themes, these blogs sometimes receive PG-13 or R ratings. Parent blogs (sometimes “mom/mommy blogs”) are famous for being detailing the achievements of children and triumphs in housework. Not these. These parents go beyond their day-to-day lives to make sense of the difficult journey that is parenthood.

Here’s a column that I can really relate to, and a topic that I’ve written about more than once before.

“Computers would be nothing without programs to run on them, so why do we spend so much time drooling over our hardware — physical bits and pieces — and so little over the software that makes the bits and pieces do what we want them to? And why are we so stingy about paying for software?” (from Blind to Bargains, Loose Wire)

Read the whole article, it’s pretty interesting.

Alright, the deployment has just finished and it’s time to highlight some of the most important changes of this week.

Let me start by traditional note that we fixed another nice set of bugs and annoyances you, our beloved users, were actively reporting during previous iterations (here’s the round of applause for you). Check out the list to get a better idea of what has changed.

There’s one very nice feature added, we thought everyone actively using PIN feature would welcome. Now you can configure BlogBridge to tag articles you are pinning automatically. I personally, like to use this feature during morning news scanning to mark pieces I would love to get back to and read more carefully later. Certainly, you can find more applications to this addition. To start experimenting, open the Preferences dialog on the Tags page and configure the tagging when pinning with the space-separated list of tags.

There’s a nice counterpart for this feature. A couple of hours ago we added a new page to My BlogBridge site with the list of all links you tagged in the BlogBridge desktop client. Note that this page shows only the links stored on our server, not del.icio.us (see Preferences / Tags page), so be not surprised to find it empty if you are an avid del.icio.us user. This feature is very fresh though and will grow more soon, so don’t forget to water it with your thoughts regularly.

A long requested feature — Hiding Guides without Unread Feeds — is also available for testing. You can find a single filter box on the Preferences / Guides page. Set the color to whatever you like or mark read Guides as hidden and BlogBridge will take care of everything else. It’s very much analogous to what we have for Feeds, and I believe no one will find it difficult to grasp. If you have any further ideas as to what types of Guides could be color coded, make sure to drop us a line. The forum is at your service.

And the last bit of advancement that I have a pleasure to highlight in this brief review is Per Feed Article Sorting… You are welcome! The life has become much simpler, hasn’t it?

If you like something, don’t like something, have any constructive criticism, or another ground breaking idea, we are always open. Write us, discuss ideas in our forum, take active part in the life of the community!

Here comes the traditional links giveaway:

• History of Changes
• Cross-platform Java Web Start version
• The most active forum on the Net

• BB - Core: Tweaked errors reporting
• BB - Core: Fixed bugs in subscribing to feeds
• BB - Core: Fixed bugs in custom proxy selector
• BB - Core: Fixed bugs in sorting of guides by title
• BB - Core: Fixed bugs in parsing feed items
• BB - Core: Fixed bugs in changing feeds
• BB - Core: Fixed bugs in removing guides
• BB - Core: Updated GZIP support to work with incomplete streams
• BB - Core: Fixed recognition of non-standard RSS versions (2.00, 2.0.x etc)
• BB - Core: Added tagging pinned articles (see Preferences / Tags)
• BB - Plugins: Added ‘type’ attribute to Resource plug-ins
• BB - Plugins: Added ‘type’ constraints to Resource (Resources, Icons, Sounds) plug-ins
• BB - Plugins: Added ‘type’ constraints to Action (Actions, Keys, Icons, Messages) plug-ins
• BB - GUI: Fixed not showing guide unread buttons on startup
• BB - GUI: Added hiding guides without unread feeds (see Preferences / Guides)
• BB - GUI: Added per feed sorting (see Feed properties / Display)
• FL: Fixed edit folder problem with trial libraries
• My BlogBridge: Added My Tags page

Lately we’ve gotten several very positive comments about BlogBridge from the Linux community. Most recently, the Linux and Open Source blog discovered BlogBridge and wrote a nice post about us:

“[snip…]If you are one of those who stays up to date with latest news and your favorite blog entries via RSS feeds, you may want to check out BlogBridge. BlogBridge is one of the best news feed and blog aggregation system. Not only will BlogBridge let you subscribe to your favorite RSS feeds, it will also help you sort through your existing feeds and help you discover new feeds.[snip…]” (from BlogBridge, Awesome RSS Reader)

and towards the end:

“[snip…]Compared to other RSS aggregators available for Linux, such as Blam, Liferea and Akregator, BlogBridge definitely stands on top which is also highly feature packed.[snip…]” (from BlogBridge, Awesome RSS Reader)

You should definitely read the whole post!

Here are other Linux related posts recommending BlogBridge that you might like to look at:

• BlogBridge, Simply the Best RSS, from “Yet Another Linux Blog“
• My Favorite Blog Readers, from “Romain Guy’s Weblog” (moved to: Curious Creature)
• Back to BlogBridge, from Brewed Fresh Daily

If you are a blogger, you are going to like this!

When you read something in BlogBridge that you would like to blog about, just type “b” (the keyboard shortcut for Article/Post to Blog) and up comes a little edit window where you compose your post and in one more click post something new on your blog!

Take a look at the very brief screen cast by clicking on the image at the left to see how easy it is.

A couple of notes:

• You need to be subscribed to the BlogBridge Service on the Basic ($5/quarter) plan to get the use of this feature.
• Of course you have to setup preferences telling BlogBridge where your blog lives. Currently we support WordPress, Movable Type and a couple of others. If your need some other one, please let us know.
• For BlogBridge Service subscribers on the Pub plan ($25/quarter) you get the ability to post to multiple blogs, to use HTML as well as to supply all the various additional meta data that blog posts have. Watch this space for another FASTFACTS!

We just released BlogBridge 5.0.1 (the most recent stable release) and an awesome (if we do say ourselves) weekly development release, BlogBridge 5.2. I hope you’ve tried it and enjoyed it. Now, busily planning the next releases, I thought I’d outline at a high level some of the directions we are considering.

I hope and expect that this will kick off a discussion and also give us guidance as we plan. Without further delay, here are the major, dare I say, “strategic” areas of work that we are considering and for which we have specific ideas:

What’s hot list: A dynamic window displaying the most hotly debated posts among all your subscriptions. The core idea here is that by noting what links (urls) are mentioned most often BlogBridge can determine what’s hot and display the relevant articles accordingly allowing you to be more efficient and saving you time. (discuss here!)

Leaderboards: Using tags applied to feeds from within the overall BlogBridge community, combined with BlogStarz ratings, display the top blogs and feeds in each of the top categories. Each leaderboard will have an OPML link allowing it to be subscribed as a Reading List. The core idea is to allow the community of BlogBridge users to learn from each other and share their insights. (discuss here!)

People like me: Allow My BlogBridge members to declare a set of topics that they are interested in. Once they do will match them up with the reading lists of other BlogBridge members that have similar interests (discuss here!)

Mobile access: View your subscribed feeds on your cell phone or pda. Subscription management would stay within BlogBridge, but you would be able to enable each Guide to present itself as a web url displaying all the feeds in a so-called “river of feeds” form. (discuss here!)

Plug-in architecture and support: Custom duplicate checkers, reorganizing of the toolbar via a plug-in, creating a plug-in repository, and more. (discuss here!)

Pin and tagging: Auto tagging of pinned articles as a way to save pinned states outside of BlogBridge; enhancing the Search dialog box to allow searching only among pinned articles. The core idea here is to allow you to be more efficient in using and re-discovering information.  (discuss here!)

Guides Magic: Continuing to help you deal with the information avalanche… Allow Guides to be automatically hidden or sorted according to how many unread articles or how highly rated the feeds are, with the aim of further helping you focus your attention. Smart Guides which dynamically contain feeds that match certain characteristics, e.g. all 5 star rated feeds with any unread. (discuss here!)

Performance and Stability: Invest more time and energy making BlogBridge even faster and more stable. (discuss here!)

I am going to close comments on this post and ask all of you to post your comments in the BlogBridge Forum. I invite and strongly encourage those BlogBridge users, fans and near fans to post your thoughts there.

Please, try and think ‘big picture’ - what would help the growth of BlogBridge, what would help further differentiate it. Leave the details of how each feature should work for later? Thanks!

Hi BlogBridgers! This week we have something really interesting for you to play with. Let me start with the most vivid feature of the last two releases — Plug-in Support. Two weeks ago we extended the application with some kind of framework that allows to install and manage extensions of various types, like Themes, Keybindings, and SmartFeeds. Today we append Resource and Code-based plug-ins to this list in order to make the picture more complete. Learn what are these creatures and how to use them on the pages of our public wiki.

• Plug-In User Guide
• Plug-In Developer Guide

What’s really important here is that using this fun stuff you can change the look and feel of the application almost completely to tune it to your personal taste without waiting for the team. Of course, we continue to work on the project actively and will deliver more and more wonderful features, but this is a very nice opportunity to indulge yourself with a new set of icons, custom colors and fonts, new SmartFeeds and who knows what else. And don’t forget to share your creations with friends!

One little note though: the framework is in the early stage of development, so please expect changes. They will be announced in this blog.

What else? The next most noticeable enhancement is database compacting and backup. From now on, when you close the application, it will make an effort to compact the database to provide the faster startup speeds and better (read more reliable) operation. If you run BlogBridge most of the time, you can call the compacting and backup commands using the Tools menu. You’ll like it!

There’s a long list of fixes and enhancements delivered by this release that were not voiced here, but you can always see them in our history of changes. Yes, and we are looking forward hearing from you: use forum, write letters, leave comments.

For those who are new to weekly releases, you can start the latest weekly build directly from our server.

• BB - Core: Fixed lockup with database access in some cases
• BB - Core: Fixed NPE when system tray is not supported
• BB - Core: Added database compacting on exit
• BB - Core: Added database compact / backup commands to the Tools menu
• BB - Core: More intelligent hidden feed updating
• BB - Sync: Registering only successful synchronization attempts
• BB - Sync: Fixed problem with plug-ins synchronization
• BB - GUI: Showing clickable working folder in the about box
• BB - GUI: When TABing into the articles pane the article is selected
• BB - GUI: Fixed Shift-TAB not working in the dialogs
• BB - GUI: Fixed always focused border around the selected guide cell
• BB - GUI: Fixed reporting no keywords when no keywords are configured
• BB - GUI: Disabled (Shift-)Del when the feeds pane isn’t selected
• BB - SmartFeed: Added ‘*’ wildcard for matching tagged objects with any tags
• BB - SmartFeed: Improved initial SmartFeed scanning speed
• BB - SmartFeed: Added “Entire Article” query feed parameter
• BB - Plug-ins: Code type support
• BB - Plug-ins: Resource type support
• BB - Plug-ins: Highlighting newly installed plug-in and enabling it by default
• BB - Plug-ins: Asking to exit after plug-in configuration change
• BB - Net: Added GZIP compression support

• BB - Core: Fixed lockup with database access in some cases
• BB - Core: Fixed NPE when system tray is not supported
• BB - Core: More intelligent hidden feed updating
• BB - Sync: Registering only successful synchronization attempts
• BB - GUI: Fixed reporting no keywords when no keywords are configured