• BB: Search Feed performance improvements
• BB: Increased responsiveness during massive updates
• BB: Range selections in the articles view
• FL: Added the “show site preview” option to the display section of a Website item

A few weeks ago we published a FASTFACTS about the Publish To Blog feature of BlogBridge. In this installment of FASTFACTS I will be showing the ‘Publisher’ level service for those of you who post to multiple blogs.

With the Publisher Level plan we offer the ability to post in one click, to as many blogs as you like. Many of our users are (no surprise) power users and power bloggers who actually contribute to many blogs. We think you are going to like it - take a look!

A couple of notes:

• You need to be subscribed to the BlogBridge Service on the Publisher ($25/quarter) plan to get the use of this feature.
• Of course you have to setup preferences telling BlogBridge where your blogs lives. Currently we support WordPress, Movable Type and a couple of others. If your need some other one, please let us know.

I just came across another detailed post commenting about BlogBridge and our expert guides, and I thought it would be of general interest, and at the same time it gives me a chance to explain some interesting things about BlogBridge and our Expert Guides.
The blog is “Sim’s Learning Collections”, where Ray Sims covers individual and organizational learning and other interesting topics, including some of this about BlogBridge:

“[snip…] … the reader looked so much better than Newzie (history) that for the second time this month I absorbed the disruption of changing my day-to-day feed reader, this time to BlogBridge. [snip…]” (from Hello New Friend Redux (Feedreader)

You should read the post though because Ray has a list of positives and negatives about BlogBridge, and I agree with every one of them.

What I want to talk about here are Ray’s comments about our Expert Topic Guides. To paraphrase from the post:

• The Expert Topic Guides are a good idea, and an “excellent idea for a newbie to a topic to get going with a core selection.
• But, the fact that they are a single person’s opinion means that if you are at that person’s mercy.
• Ray suggest some ways to have more community involvement in defining or changing or rating the expert guides.

All three are fair points. Here’s the scoop:

The idea of using human experts instead of some bot is as follows: The world of blogs is not at all uniform in its coverage, and in fact many many blogs are about a whole bunch of relatively unrelated topics that while they are very good, they aren’t focused enough for a collection like ours.

So our belief is that for now (like the very early days of Yahoo) what is needed are people with some kind of ‘right to an opinion’ to help us find the best content in each topic. So I stick by the view that this is a worthwhile approach.

But this is a fair point: some of our experts update their list much more often than others. Some of them are just more credible experts. And in some topics (e.g. branding) are sliced very thin (”The Future of Branding” and “Branding Strategy”)

It also makes good sense to allow the users of the information to give feedback, for example: Thumbs up/down on a guide or an expert, a way to suggest a new feed for an expert Guide, and even a way to suggest a new, better guide on a topic, or to suggest a new topic to cover. These are all excellent ideas which we will be pursuing.

We are always working hard to recruit new Topic Experts, and so we are constantly expanding. Sometimes we find someone who has real expertise in something related but not identical to one we already have. We tend to bring them into the tent because for now, more is better.

So in summary:

• We believe in having expert guides with human faces curating our lists.
• It is true that we have focused more on bringing new faces into the tent than on refining, improving and assessing the ones we already have.
• We can and will do better in allowing community feedback about both our content and our experts.

• BB - Core: Sharing feeds during OPML import
• BB - GUI: On exit, if there are downloads going on, show the confirmation dialog
• BB - GUI: Added “[ ] Pinned articles only” option to search dialog
• BB - GUI: Fixed “Left” over the article text moves focus away
• BB - GUI: Mac - Updated file chooser
• BB - GUI: Mark articles are read / unread per date group (context menu)
• BB - GUI: New icons for Search and Query Feeds instead of prefixes
• FL: Added parsing of feed items for enclosures and MP3s
• FL: Added play buttons to the items
• FL: Added experimental website preview through iframe
• FL: Reworked the item details page
• FL: Fixed the glitch with automatically switching to Admin acc type on profile update
• FL: Fixed incorrect icon for the Website type in the tree view mode

Thanks to SeoMoz.org for awarding us a “Web 2.0 Award” in the Feed Management category. Here’s what was said about the selection process:

“Rated, Ranked and Awarded: Our team reviewed hundreds of sites in the Web 2.0 sphere to uncover the best in each of 41 categories. From there, we assembled a team of 25 of the most knowledgeable, well-respected experts in the field to vote on the winners.”

and also:

“We began accepting nominations for this year’s awards soon after the 2006 awards were announced. Some of the sites we received didn’t fit our criteria (i.e. they were not “Web 2.0″ at all), but many did, and some have ended up finalists and winners this year. Once we closed nominations, the process of reviewing websites began. While it was easy to eliminate some nominees, the list of viable candidates became lengthy, to say the least.”

Read all about Web 2.0 and the overall award.

Needless to say we are proud and grateful for this honor!

I just came across another “which Blog reader do you like best” polls. If you support our project, it would be great if you throw in a vote for us there. All publicity helps us!

Happy Friday evening to everybody. BlogBridge Team is speaking.

Today we deploy the set of little but very interesting and important features for you to toy with. Let me start from the most significant improvement first. Many of you still remember these discussions of how to solve the problem of archiving. We need some articles to be stored on our local drives for later reference. What’s more, we often need enclosures to be downloaded automatically during a busy day, so that when the time comes to leave for home, we don’t rush downloading something quickly to listen on a way back. Finally, the dreams come true.

What you see in the picture to the right is the updated look of the Advanced tab of the feed preferences dialog. There are two sections added: the custom update period (right, you can set it per-feed now, and it works great!), and the auto-saving controls for both articles and enclosures. As you can see, I have both features enabled and saving content to different directories. Certainly, you can use the same for both; it’s completely up to you.

What’s remarkable is that we have a very flexible file naming schemes right off the bat. For the articles saving, for example, I selected the date and title format, which means that every time the article comes, the application creates the directory with the date of arrival inside the selected main directory and puts the article in a cute, fully customizable through CSS style sheets, HTML file. The name of the file itself will be the name of the article.

For the enclosures I used a bit different naming format. I like enclosures to be saved in the same directory, but still need to know which feeds they came from. That’s why I used the feed – title format. The name of the file will be the original name of the enclosure prefixed with the name of the feed. Fun, isn’t it?

The combination of these features is so powerful that, truth be told, I get creeps on my back every time I think what ELSE could I do. Just to name a couple of usages, you can make a SmartFeed to look for articles you like and ask it to save the findings in some folder. This folder can be your pocket PC’s shared folder, for example, and you get all interesting news delivered right to your portable assistant, so that you can read and listen to them while you are on the go. As for enclosures, what if you were saving them directly to your iPod or iTunes music directory?

Among other updates, some minor GUI fixes mainly for Linux users, the CTRL-ScrollWheel support for zooming in and out, Digg feeds fix and amazing new feature for the plug-in developers. Now you can add your own commands to the context menus of the application.

See you soon and have fun!

For your clicking pleasure:

• History of Changes
• Cross-platform Java Web Start version
• Worlds of Wisdom

• BB - Plugins: Added the way to customize context and main menus with code plug-ins
• BB - Plugins: Added advanced preferences plug-in type (see wiki doc)
• BB - Core: Fixed the URL of the FAQ page in BB and configured
• BB - Core: Added per feed update period
• BB - Core: [Basic plan minimum] Added automatic articles saving
• BB - Core: [Basic plan minimum] Added automatic enclosure saving
• BB - GUI: Enabled CTRL-ScrollWheel for zoom in / out
• BB - Net: Fixed Digg feeds
• FL: Added ‘Website’ as another type of items
• FL: On “Ok, and More” saving the folder configuration