I’ve got a project that will require the use of Drupal (or something like it, but it’s looking like Drupal at the moment - I’ve got a mockup running for the project, and it’s solving about 90+% of their defined needs just using a stock Drupal installation with a handful of plugins), and one of the things that the users will have to do will be to upload files (images, .doc, .zip, whatever) into the system for reflection/commenting/review. They would also like to use these uploaded files outside of the system (for instance, on their own web pages, in an “ePortfolio”, whatever), and we’d like to provide a solution that wouldn’t force them to upload the files separately into two locations (their WebDAV volume for “regular” use, and into the Drupal system for review).
Between Flock and BlogBridge, this whole online-community stuff has completely changed for me in the last 24 hours.
BlogBridge: I blew through my RSS feeds this morning so quickly that I thought I had missed most of them. Nope. It’s just that much faster to check feeds now, and the items are nicely sorted by my Starz ranking on the feed, so I read the more “interesting” stuff first. Nice.
Flock: Loving the del.icio.us integration. Less enthralled with the blog-managment integration, but it’s still pretty nice. I’m going to try it as my default browser for awhile to see how it works out.
So, Flock looks cool. A custom build of Firefox, with direct tie-ins to social stuff like del.icio.us and weblog posting. Has a handy blog manager built in, like a MarsEdit Lite. This could be one handy tool… It’s pegging my CPU right now, so I’m not going to play with it as much as I’d like…
First, BlogBridge is a great app. It works very well, and fits into my RSS workflow better than anything else I’ve ever used. I can totally see myself using this app for a long, long time. With that in mind, here are some ideas for making it even better…
Better MacOSX integration?
run as normal app with menubar in system’s, and app icon, etc… (as opposed to a generic java app)
accept feeds passed by other apps (safari’s RSS icon now spawns a fresh copy of BlogBridge, and then does nothing with the result)
Perhaps show a different dock icon when there are pending new items to read? Don’t have to show the count, just a flag to say “hey! there’s new stuff!”
Insane amounts of RAM (real and virtual) are being used on MacOSX.
When viewing a link in the browser, it should (optionally?) open the link in the background, rather than bringing the browser to the front.
No search field?
creating a “SmartFeed” for a simple search isn’t ideal
Article Cache
no option to save items for 30 days or 6 months or forever. Only an “Articles remaining after purge” setting. What does that mean?
Image feeds
if I have a SmartFeed that pulls items from other Image Feeds (Flickr subscriptions), the items show in linear chronological view, even if all feeds are set to be “Image” feeds. There’s no way to set that for the SmartFeed itself.
If I have a feed that I manually set to be an “Image feed” by setting that flag on the subscription, the images are dimmed out unless the mouse is over the image. That doesn’t happen if I create a new SmartFeed for a Flickr tag. Inconsistent behaviour.
If I set a feed to be an “Image feed”, if I click on the image, nothing appears to happen. I have to right-click and select “open link in browser” (say, if I want to mark a Flickr image as a Favorite, or comment, etc…)
Smart Feeds
I set a SmartFeed to use the parameters: “Feed Tag contains ‘Flickr’” and “Status is ‘Unread’”, thinking I’d get a handy SmartFeed for all unviewed Flickr images. But it didn’t find anything. I changed the first parameter to “Feed title contains ‘Photo’”, and it works fine. Hmm…
And then there’s the “synchronization” feature - where it syncs your settings with a server using an XML-RPC api. Very cool feature. But it hasn’t worked for me yet. Each time, it gives me a “communication error” message. Doh. Then, there’s the dialog that controls synchronizations:
It’s not perfect, and performance isn’t quite at the level of a “native” app (but the java penalty is totally acceptable), but man, is BlogBridge one nice aggregator! It’s got the great all-in-one-page combined view, and some great filtering/grouping tools. I’m loving the Starz feature, and tagging feeds. And, it’s got a special view for “image” feeds - like my Flickr subscriptions - that looks like a photo album rather than a linear list. Rock on.
I’d noticed in the last few days that requests to my blog (for pages and feeds) seemed to last forever. I mean, the page would load, but the activity monitor would show the page as still loading. If I viewed details in Safari, I’d see that the images and stylesheets had all loaded, but the HTML source was still appearing to be downloading. If I stopped the page loading, all appeared fine, and the complete source was there (including the footer at the bottom of the page when viewed by source).
I’m preparing some stuff for a workshop I’m doing on weblogs and RSS next month, and am gathering some links to aggregators I could recommend to the people coming to the workshop. Obviously, Bloglines and Google’s RSS reader are good online aggregators, but desktop tools are just plain cooler.
But, it’s got a LOT of nice little touches. You can tag feeds. Star them (and filter views based on star ratings). Create smart listings of posts. It also does something cool that I haven’t seen in another aggregator - it creates a little thumbnail indicator bargraph for the activity of a feed over the past few days. You can also give it a list of keywords, and it automatically highlights these words in every post.
I just installed the HTMLArea module for Drupal on the weblogs.ucalgary.ca server. Wow. That’s one nice WYSIWYG editor! And I’m someone that usually hates WYSIWYG editors because of the craptacular code they typically spew out (like the last 2 I’d tried on that server).
This one appears to create nice, clean, semantic markup. And offers a “full screen” mode to give you essentially a “Dreamweaver Lite” experience - OK it’s more like “Dreamweaver Extremely Light”, but more than adequate.
Last week, an undergrad student here at the U of C stumbled across both weblogs.ucalgary.ca and wiki.ucalgary.ca. This student was familiar with blogging and wiki (having a LiveJournal already), and dove right in. And quickly proceeded to blow me away with what a student can/will do given a bit of trust and some supporting resources.
In the 6 days since discovering the wiki, this student has made 206 edits to pages. Created new pages. Created page templates. Categories. Shell pages for faculties, departments, and clubs. Templates for user pages. Fleshed out a very interesting user page for himself (including a couple of ideas that I will blatantly borrow for myself). In the “old” way of publishing stuff to the internet, this would have never happened, because there is no way in hell an Institution would let an undergrad edit a faculty web page. Oh, how things change when you open up a little.
Holy CRAP that’s annoying. I have Safari running on both computers pretty much 100% of the time. My Powerbook’s copy is set to use RSS, and to update feeds automatically. I’d noticed earlier this morning that my subscriptions were holding almost 30,000 items. I thought to myself “Hey, that’s cool! Usually, it corrupts and resets itself to a fresh database at around 20,000 items. I guess that problem’s been fixed somehow.”
One of the things I really love about WordPress is its always-fresh style of pulling pages directly from the database rather than generating hundreds or thousands of static pages. It makes publishing much quicker - you’re just adding a new row to the posts table - since there is no “Publishing Pages” stage, as in MovableType etc…
However, that is also the Achilles heal of WordPress - works fine as long as the load is miniscule, but if you get Slashdotted, or have a bunch of simultaneous views, the database can bog down pretty dramatically. Usually, that’s not a problem, but the threat is there.
