That’s a great day for us! Finally, we have released the new exciting version of BlogBridge, bridging the gap between feed aggregators and OPML feeds lists publishers.

Although, it’s in its weekly build state, which means that some glitches still may be there, the Reading List support is already somewhat terrific. Our early testers already reported about their renewed experience since this feature made its way into their workflows. Just to remind, the Reading List is someone’s list of feeds. We can say, the list of preferences that person wishes to share. Before now, people had to use static Import feature for loading these lists into their readers. Today BlogBridge offers you to dynamically monitor the changes in external lists and update your subscriptions automatically in addtion to traditional importing means. You can find the management pane in the Guide Properties or Create Guide dialog boxes.

Next, a really big heap of work has been done in order to make Synchronization functionality more intuitive and approachable. These days we offer cross-workstation synchronization of subscription lists (guides and feeds) as well as the read state of articles and lots of other attributes. Our previous attempts unveiled tons of weak places and numerious issues we made our best to address in this release. Again, we don’t expect the current state to be final. Quite opposite, we encourage everyone to share their feelings and ideas on improving this area with us. All in all, it’s your convenience on the bet. You are always welcome!

Another big change is a significant improvement of keywords and SmartFeeds criteria syntax. So far it was extremely simple and I would even say oversimplified. This deployment brings an updated experience, giving unbelievable flexibility through use of various wildcards. The best trick is that all your previous criteria and lists of keywords will continue to work smoothly but, having new power tools under your fingertips, you are free to unleash it and enhance your hits immensely. The summary of syntax will be published on the main product site promptly and I don’t like to duplicate it here.

Final major change is an addition of detection of duplicate subscriptions. Finally, we added an initial alert box telling you that there’s another feed with the same URL present. The alert appears as soon as the application finds the connection between some feeds in your list and it may take from seconds to minutes (depending on the speed of your Internet connection) or happen immediately if you specify a feed URL instead of some site URL, which requires additional resolution. The counterpart of the feature is added to Cleanup Wizard in order to help you detect and remove duplicates. When you check “Duplicates” box in the dialog box, the wizard displays all feeds in duplicates groups, which means that you have to uncheck those you wish to leave before the final “OK” hit.

Well, too much news, no? Of course, it’s better to try once than to hear times. Go, try it and let us know how it works for you!

And, yes, the official announcement with a more detailed list of changes can be found at the product site.

Comments from the past

D’Arcy Norman on 12/09/2005

Very cool, Aleksey! So, any plans to release a packaged binary distro for 2.9? The standalone apps are still sitting at 2.7… :-)

Aleksey Gureiev on 12/10/2005

It’s intentional. :) Version 2.7 is from the Stable seriels. This build isn’t stable and there’s no way to call it this way at any rate. Nevertheless, you can upgrade your copy at your own risk by taking blogbridge.jar and lib/bbutilities.jar from you know where. :)