Blogbridge

I've been experimenting with a copy of BlogBridge Feed Library, to test it out for possible deployment for use by students and faculty here at UCalgary. It's not an official project, but I think it's important enough to warrant investigation. What is BlogBridge Feed Library (BBFL)? From their website:

Feed Library (FL) creates a flexible web based structure to showcase Feeds, Reading Lists and Podcasts to employees in your company, or members of your organization. It will be the 'store' where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their Aggregators. And, here's the important point: these are recommendations by people in your organization for people in your organization.

It's a directory. Of feeds. That can be distributed across the internets, and organized in any fashion. It's been running the Expert Guides section of Blogbridge's website for several months, and has provided a pretty cool resource for finding and subscribing to feeds. It's very cool, in that it doesn't try to do too much. It doesn't pretend to be an aggregator. It's just a directory. It provides friendly ways to preview feeds right in the directory, and to subscribe to groups of feeds via OPML representing folders within the directory. Aggregation is left to the individual's taste in applications. Any feed reader that groks OPML will play nicely with the great directory OPML features. And any app can, of course, subscribe to the individual feeds.

It's a really great directory application, and has been running well in production on BlogBridge's server for some time now. But it needs some love if it's going to thrive in an academic environment.

Currently, there is a small group of trusted stewards, or "Experts" that are given folders of feeds to manage. That's fine when there may be a dozen or two contributing "Experts" - but how does that scale to a class with 20, 60, or 300 students? How does that scale to an institutional level with 30,000 students and hundreds of faculty playing in the pool? How do you refine control so that a student can add their feeds to the appropriate places, without having to go through a central gatekeeper?

Read More

I just got a note from Pito Salas over at Blogbridge, and it looks like my Edublogs Guide was the most popular guide on the service for the month of July! That Guide is the snapshot of my Edublogs reading list in BlogBridge, so it's cool to see that it's coming in handy for someone.

Or, is someone just using it as a starting point for some Pipes/GoogleMashup/OPML automated coolness? Either way, Edublogs kicked ass and took names in July.

I can't believe it's been a whole month since I started trying out Google Reader (GR) full time. I wanted to see if I could live in a browser-based aggregator, and was curious about how far it had come since the early days.

The short version is: it's less efficient at reading boatloads of feeds and items. But, the always-on, available-anywhere design of GR makes it worthwhile.

The long version is, well, longer. I still much of the niceties of BlogBridge (BB). Things like having a "photo gallery" view, for viewing images in feeds (I subscribe to a fair number of Flickr tag feeds, so this is quite handy). I've got a workaround for the star ratings that BB uses - I've created two "tags" in GR: "5-stars" and "4-stars" and have applied them to appropriate feeds. That definitely helps prioritize reading important stuff from all of my feeds/tags without having to hunt for them. Because it's browser based, I can use native del.icio.us interfaces, so that feature from BB isn't missed. The most annoying thing I've found with GR isn't directly GR's fault. I have to do a fair bit of clicking to get through all of my tags. I need to do some more work to add appropriate feeds to "5-stars", "4-stars", "3-stars" etc... so I can focus on levels of importance rather than subjects.

I've been forcing myself to keep thinking about (and rethinking) the concept of EduGlu - a set of tools and/or practices that would more effectively support distributed online publishing while maintaining the sense of group and community needed to make this stuff more meaningful in an educational context. I waver back and forth, between building The One True �berapp To Aggregate Them All, and a more freeform, organic, barebones directory.

I tried. I really did. I wanted to give Google Reader a full week to see how well it works as a full-time feed aggregator.

I couldn't do it.

My morning check-in took 5 times longer than normal this morning. Google Reader seems like it would be nice for a small set of feeds, but it becomes unwieldy on my subscriptions. Endless scrolling, lots of clicking on folders, and waiting for items to be added to the bottom of the page, with no indication of how far you've come through the items in a folder (the scroll bar eventually becomes pegged at the bottom, even if there are 300 items left to read). And GR has no concept of a photo feed, so they're all displayed inline rather than in a grid, making it take an order of magnitude longer to go through my Flickr feeds. Frustrating.

I've been a raving, drooling BlogBridge fanboy for some time now. It's the best darned desktop aggregator I've used. That hasn't changed.

But, with all of the cool kids using Google Reader, I decided it's time to really give it a chance again. I dropped it like it's hot the last time I tried it because it doesn't have a feed star rating system, nor smart feeds. But, it's got a pretty flexible feed tagging system, which can be easily cajoled into performing these duties.

I recorded my morning RSS checkin with BlogBridge 4.1 (well, I recorded it with iShowU, but the checkin was done using BlogBridge). The power of the feed star rating feature is really hard to describe - it's much easier to just show it.

I wound up with a 16 minute recording, which is about how long it takes for me to check in on 443 feeds first thing in the morning. I took some time to describe the BlogBridge interface, but skimmed slightly more than usual so it probably worked out about the same duration.

I was asked to share my Edublogs reading list, which is published automatically by my copy of BlogBridge, in the BlogBridge Topic Guides website. It's basically a web front end for the .opml file generated by BlogBridge, but it might be a handy way to share the list.

So, now I'm a "BlogBridge Topic Expert" - I'm rather uncomfortable with the term "expert" but it's their word, not mine. The new Edublogs Reading List is online, and (I think) should stay synced with my list in BlogBridge, so maintenance won't be a problem.

BlogBridge, my most favoritest RSS aggregator app, was bumped to version 3.0 this week. Lots and lots of small improvements, but most of the big changes are under the hood. Performance rocks (it totally doesn't feel like a Java app - it feels like any other native application), and things like syncing feeds and preferences with the BlogBridge service (for accessing from other machines, or publishing guides as OPML, or just as backup) is nearly instantaneous.

The BlogBridge folks rolled out a cool update to their RSS reader. The biggest addition is a very handy search tool, strongly inspired by Spotlight. Here's a sample of a quick search to find any posts in any of my feeds which have been published since yesterday, and contain the word "podcasting":

Now that's just plain cool. It was technically possible by creating SmartFeeds in previous versions, but that was a clunky process that wasn't well suited to ad-hoc on-the-fly searches. They've been working on some UI refinements to remove or rethink or hide the geekier things, which is a good thing.

I just updated my copy of Blogbridge to the latest weekly (2.12) and in this version they threw the switch on OPML publishing of folders/guides of feeds. I took a couple of minutes to gather my education-related subscriptions into one guide, and tried publishing it as OPML.

D'Arcy's Wild and Wacky Edublogs Reading List

It contains 102115 feeds of edubloggy goodness. There are some stale feeds that I just can't bring myself to delete (you know, in case they ever post something). If you're using an aggregator that groks live OPML feeds, just subscribe to the URL. If you're using anything else, you may need to download the OPML and manually import it.

I've been using Blogbridge for awhile, but I didn't truly appreciate it until I tried to switch to another RSS reader. After I left, I realized I was spending much more time reading my feeds than I was when I was using Blogbridge. After switching back to it, it's like coming home. I'm blasting through my feeds quickly, and "checking in" isn't an onerous process anymore.

So, what makes Blogbridge better? How am I more efficient using Blogbridge than the other reader apps? Let me count the ways:

After I wrote some thoughts about what I'm looking for in an RSS reader, I realized that the only application that comes close to what I was describing is BlogBridge. It has prioritization of feeds and items via "Starz", and ties into social services (both a custom network for sharing keywords and ratings, and a direct connection to my del.ico.us account).

It's got some room for improvement - my biggest beefs are resource hogging and the seeming inability of java apps to open URLs in a browser without bringing it to the front. But they aren't fatal flaws - only annoying.

In yet another flip-flop in my preferences for primary applications, I just switched to Vienna 2 as my RSS/Feed aggregator. It's basically an Open Source clone of NetNewsWire. NNW kinda turned sour for me when it was bought out and the .Mac etc... features got tossed in the trash can.

Vienna is a nice app - it's a native Cocoa app, so it runs spanky fast. It uses the SQL Lite database, so it's pretty speedy - and there's a chance I could write something to do something useful with the database if I really wanted to.

I've become a huge fan of BlogBridge - it has been the most efficient and powerful rss aggregator I've ever used. But, it kinda sucked because it didn't behave like a native app. I've kind of got a fetish for native apps on MacOSX - apps that behave as expected, look as expected, and do stuff the way they should.

Well, BlogBridge 2.7 is now available as an "actual" application! It runs great and looks the way it should.

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.

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'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.

I was clicking links on the Wikipedia list of RSS aggregators, and saw BlogBridge - a cross-platform, java-based aggregator designed for "civilians".

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.