I wrote this really simple introduction to locating and following news and current affairs blogs. Check it out, you might find it interesting.

This is a question I hear all the time. I thought I’d write a bit of an introduction to the topic. Check out “The difference between a web site and a blog” on Squidoo.

This is not schadenfreude, really.

You might have noticed postings all around the web today about a Google Reader outage:

“Earlier today Google Reader was completely unavailable, and it’s still acting flaky, which means finding out what is going on in the world I track requires visiting a lot of Web sites that I ordinarily consume in the RSS reader. Net result, my time is wasted surfing the Web for what I get in my feeds. It’s like cutting grass with scissors instead of a lawn mower.” (from What happens when Google Reader goes dark?)

We regularly hear from potential BlogBridge fans who’ve decided that they need a web-based blog reader and disqualify BlogBridge on the basis that you have to actually run some software on your own computer. So much that we’ve had to write an FAQ: “Why is BlogBridge a downloadable application and not a Web 2.0 site?”

I guess I will have to update the FAQ because there’s one more advantage: “Not dependent on some other site’s uptime”.

Listen, I am not gloating. Google is an unbelievably amazing company and Google Reader is the best in its class. I am sure they will address whatever the problem was and come back better than ever.

It’s just that this is one perspective by which a local application is superior to needing to access a centralized web site.

Good day everyone! This Friday’s release brings two shining new experimental features. One of them extends the intelligence of the application quite a bit, whereas the other deals with the performance and the ease of use.

We tackle more and more information these days making it easy to miss something really important. We think it’s reasonable to assume that you will be interested in topics mentioned often in the feeds you care about. Make sense? That realization led led us to the new spectacular (IMHO) feature — a What’s Hot list.

The What’s Hot feature scans your subscriptions for links that are mentioned in a lot of articles and displays them in a nice and manageable list. Walking through the list, you can see what’s in the spotlight of today’s blogging community and read only these important posts before diving in deeper.

The next thing to check out is our new pagination of the articles list. This addition is valuable mainly to those who have huge queues of unread articles or run immense searches with SmartFeeds.

You adjust the configuration in the preferences (see Articles page), and BlogBridge breaks the list of articles into multiple pages. A pagination control appears at the top of the articles list (see the picture) when it’s needed.

Play with this feature! Our suggestion is to try some very low values for the page size (like 10 or 20) and see how dramatically the performance increases. It really is, and it happens because of the reduced load on the rendering engine.

OK, here’s the confession. I wasn’t comfortable with visiting long feeds before now as it took some time to render the strip of articles, but now I’m no longer afraid of the delays because there aren’t any. (Oh, yeah, and we have some further plans to improve the rendering speed even more soon)

With this new feature there’s no need to limit search feeds to 200 articles as the pagination will take care of the large volumes of graphics and rendering. That’s why we decided to remove the restriction of 200 articles all together. We believe it’s what many of our users expected and will be happy to find out.

These are all major feature for the last two weeks. Please let us know what you think. Please try the new stuff, report the errors and…

Have fun!

• History of Changes
• Cross-platform Java Web Start version
• Our Forum

• BB - Core: Added What’s Hot feature
• BB - GUI: Added articles pagination
• BB - GUI: Fixed the stale article after the search feed deselection
• BB - GUI: Improved feed rendering speed through shifting some code to a worker thread
• BB - SmartFeeds: Removed smart feed article limitation
• BB - Cleanup: Fixed the problem with removing random articles during cleanup (not the old ones first)

Ok, sorry for using that geeky term. The challenge for us is that there are lots and lots of people on the web sharing collections of feeds with each other but it’s new enough that all we have so far is a techie term: OPML.

My subscription list in BlogBridge might be interesting to my clients, who all use Google Reader. And vice versa. If one has the URL to their reading list in OPML, others can use BlogBridge subscribe, dynamically, to it.

Just yesterday we published “Feeds you Need” in which we pointed out that there are some really interesting feeds coming from Consumer Reports. As it turns out, everyone, including us, do this with a format called OPML.

In this episode of Fast Facts I show you how incredibly easy it is to subscribe dynamically to a whole list of feeds - all you need is the link to the OPML. View this short screen cast to learn how to do it in BlogBridge.

This is the start of a new series on our web site, “The Feeds You Need”. In our constant scouring of the web we often find interesting and little known collections of feeds which we will be highlighting for your reading pleasure!

Starting with the Consumer Reports magazine and Consumer Reports Online. Who would have thought, we recently discovered that this venerable magazine has a comprehensive, and public set of Feeds. Check them out!

Consumer Reports Feeds (OPML)

If you want to subscribe to all of these feeds in one step, just launch BlogBridge and look at the Guide menu for the command “Subscribe to Reading List”. Right click on “OPML” above, copy the URL to your clipboard, and paste that as the Reading List URL in the Subscribe dialog box. That’s all there is to it!

Today a major review came out in Robin Good’s influential Master New Media blog. It’s great to see this kind of detailed information about the work we are doing with BlogBridge. Thanks Robin and Michael! Here is what they say:

“The result is a streamlined, easy-to-use, cross-platform feed reader. Now that it has also taken on publishing capabilities Blogbridge is going to save bloggers a lot of time spent copying and pasting data from one post to another. Joining the conversation just got even easier.” (from Robin Good’s Latest News)

You should definitely read the whole article because there is a lot of great general blogging information as well as screen shots and critical commentary.

Read “From RSS Reader To Direct Online Publisher: Newsmastering Away With Blogbridge“

Hello everyone! This week’s announcement comes a little bit late. That’s because I went to Kiev on Friday to take my IELTS (International English Language Testing System) examinations. It’s too early to judge about the results, but it feels really good. Anyway, let’s see where this weekly release takes us.

First things first, the most noticeable feature is the multi-article selection. This version of BlogBridge lets you select multiple articles from the list on the right and perform all known operations over the selected group: pinning, tagging, saving images, sending links to a friend — everything, but with a little exception. You still can’t use the Post To Blog feature in bulk. It’s simply because we have some special plans for it and it’s too early to remove the covering.

So, how do you select the articles. The methods are similar to everywhere else: you can still select a single article by clicking on it, you can toggle any article selection with CTRL-Click (and it will be CMD-Click for our Mac users next time), or select the range of articles between the current leading selection and the article you SHIFT-Click on inclusively. We are thinking if it’s important to show the leading selection somehow (the article you selected the last) or it’s quite clear where you are. Have an opinion, make sure to share it!

Among other changes are usual performance improvements. We work closely with many users to collect the data on what goes wrong and why in order to make the product be quick and reliable. If you have any questions, recommendations or willing to contribute some code, don’t hesitate to meet us in the forum. We are always open!

Have fun!

• History of Changes
• Cross-platform Java Web Start version
• Our very own forum