Published on
Tuesday, February 14, 2006 in
Tagged.
So last week I was at work and needed to find a decent feed reader for windows. I stumbled accross BlogBridge, a multi-platform(Windows, Mac OSX, and *nix) RSS aggregator with some unique features.
The way it handles groups or ‘Guides’ is pretty nice. Instead of having an ungodly number of unread feeds displayed for each guide, it gives you the number of feeds with unread posts. Once you descend into a guide it gives you a list of the feeds, each able to have it’s own user defined rankings and tags(publishable to services such as del.icio.us) and list’s the number of item’s unread in each feed. Then you have the feed entry window, which lists all the entries for that feed(up to a user defined amount). Each feed entry can again have a star ranking and tags. There are 3 different way’s to view each feed entry. A collapsed list, a list with truncated entries, or a full list with full RSS entries.
The best feature of Blog Bridge however, is it’s syncing capabilities. You can sign up for an account at Blog Bridge, which is free, and I have gotten no spam from them yet. It allows you to sync your feeds up to thier server, go to work, sync your feeds down from the server, and not having to re-read any feeds or mark any as read. It automatically keeps track for you. This is the main reason I was switching over to a web based aggregator, I read feeds on more than one computer, and I would like them to all be in sync. I am still going to try out feedlounge, because I have used it and I love it as an aggregator.
The only problem I have come accross with Blog Bridge is that the Mac OSX version is a bit slower than the other aggregators on the platform, not to slow to use, just a bit slower than the rest. Other than that I am a big fan of the whole Blog Bridge experience and the fact that I didn’t have to pay for it. If this meets your needs, go ahead and check it out.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Published on
Monday, February 13, 2006 in
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About a week ago I wrote about Blog Participation. That particular post received quite a bit of activity(for this site) and the general consensus was that the main reason people don’t leave comments as much as they might like is because they get all of thier content via RSS.
To that I propose this idea … Who’s to say an RSS feed can’t contain a form? Or perhaps have the feed contain the XMLRPC URL and have builtin commenting via XMLRPC in the feed reader? The XMLRPC idea might open up even more doors for blog spam which no one wants, but perhaps that is a problem that could be addressed.
I know I would absolutely love the ability to send a comment to a blog from a feed reader. I don’t believe that XMLRPC comes with that functionality currently but it couldn’t be to hard to write in there if it’s not. Even if it won’t work that way, you could just include the URL that would be needed to post a comment in the RSS feed and have the functionality builtin to the feed reader to take advantage of that. Anyone else have an opinion on this?
Popularity: 1% [?]
Published on
Monday, February 13, 2006 in
Tagged.
As most of you know, coComment is now allowing users to invite people on thier own. I have 2 invites and if anyone would like an invite just drop a comment, also Merlin left a few invite codes in my other coComment post, not sure if they will still work but it’s worth a shot if you want and account!
Popularity: 1% [?]
Published on
Monday, February 13, 2006 in
Tagged.
Last week at work I was asked to add a feature to an existing website that we host. The base code for this website was written years ago with register_globals assumed to be on or registered automatically. That and the horrible code aside, I decided not to mess with any of it and just write my own little section of code that did what it needed to and drop it in to the site. I’m not sure if that was the best idea from a design stand point, but his code was not commented at all and the variable/function names were not descriptive of what they stored or did in the least. It would have taken me days if not weeks just to figure out what everything did.
All that aside, while writing the module they asked me to write I was faced with the problem of making sure an array always has the same number of entries in it. What it does is pull information from a database and display a static number of those entries. Keeping that limited to a static number was not a problem, however what if there weren’t that many entries in the database? How do I go back through the array and populate it with static information? This is what I came up with.
When I first got this written and working I was quite proud that I had gotten it to work. Then I got to thinking about it and it just seems like there should be a better way to do such a thing. I did some research online but I couldn’t find anything on that particular subject. Anyone out there got any ideas?
Popularity: 1% [?]
Published on
Sunday, February 12, 2006 in
Tagged.
I know I am a bit slacking on this … but I have a very good excuse. I have spent the last week or two trying to use 30 Boxes and I have been entirely incapable of doing so. I have come to the realization that my life is boring and uneventful, and when it’s not it is definitely not planned out. I did however force myself to use the features of 30 Boxes just so I could get an idea of how it works.
I’ve got to say I realy like it and look forward to the day where I have things to schedule in my Calendar. It has a very cool entry box where you just freehand type in an event and it parses all of the information out of it and posts it to your calendar. It can also keep track of your flickr images, your myspace blogs, livejournal posts … it can also track any RSS feed and display it in your calendar. It also has tight integration with upcoming.org, another social calendar. I haven’t been able to try that out because I don’t have an account there … must be the whole lack of need for a calendar at this point in my life.
It also has another seemingly cool feature, the whole social aspect of it. I haven’t been able to try this out either because I don’t really know anyone else who uses 30 Boxes, but basically what it does is you can add people to your buddies and track what plans they have. Would be really great for co-workers who are always on the move and need to know when they can get together to talk about the new project. Or say you and your S.O. have really busy work lives, say one of you travels … this would be another great way to keep in touch with each others doings. Or even for a group of friends who wanna know whats going on. Perhaps an organization having a calendar of events all the members could subscribe to. The possibilities are endless.
The only feature I didn’t see that I need in a calendar is more advanced repeat capabilities. Currently 30 boxes can repeat an event every week, every month, or every year. One of the main things I would like to be able to do is schedule something to occue on the first of the month, or the last, or the third, etc … Would also be nice to be able to have something repeat every X days or weeks from a particular starting point. I posted to their forums and got a few other requests for this feature, so I don’t doubt it will be in there eventually.
Another feature I would like is for you to be able to subscribe to an iCal calendar feed and have iCal subscribe to your 30 Boxes calendar feed so that they are essentially the same calendar. If your at home on your PC, you can use iCal as it would be faster than a web interface, but when you go out to work or to the coffee hosue, your 30 Boxes account has all the events you posted in iCal while you were at home, and when you go back home, iCal has all your 30 Boxes posts from when you were out.
Even without these features, I think this is a really awesome service especially for the social aspect of it. I do think that those feature will be in by the time it is out of Beta along with a stream of other fantastic features. Defiantely a service worth using and keeping an eye on.
Popularity: 1% [?]