Today we deployed one very interesting feature. But first, look at the Favorites section of the sidebar. Would you believe if I told you that this list is generated right from the “Favorites” guide in my BlogBridge client? The guide is being published as a Reading List. I’m simply dragging feeds to it, removing, renaming and tagging them as I wish and the BlogBridge Service does all the rest. Science fiction? No, absolutely not.

Here’s the HTML excerpt of this particular page:

<h2>Favorites</h2>
<script src="http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/2/Favorites.js?tags=true"></script>
<p style="margin: 15px 0 0 20px;">
  <a href="http://www.blogbridge.com/rl/2/Favorites.opml">
    <img border="0" src="http://blog.noizeramp.com/images/readinglist.gif" />
  </a>
</p>

You can see that the list of blogs/feeds is generated by the JavaScript scriptlet provided by the BlogBridge service for my favorites reading list. This scriptlet gives immediate access to the most fresh version of the reading list I publish which makes my site a little bit more dynamic and keeps maintenance at its minimum.

A little geeky? There’s another, more official post rich on technicalities available on the BlogBridge home site.

That’s one small step for BlogBridge… one giant leap for blogkind. ;)

Have a good time!

Phew, what a busy day was yesterday. I was absolutely mesmerized deploying and announcing till late night, hence I even hadn’t got a second to make this final post to my own blog. Well, you can blame me on being not very objective about it, but this release will become one of my cherished memories for sure. Not only is it packed with lots of features I’m personally proud of, but also the deployment went well, we’ve got nice and inspiring coverage from our users (check out this post by Brian from The Institue of Hybernautics) and stuff.

I don’t wish to start outlining the changes even in brief here as probably you could have already seen them. If not — check the official announcement and history of changes.

It’s a bit early to judge about download stats yet as most of the services we use for our public announcements are still have no data available, but according to our internal counters this release has an unprecedented density of installations for the latest several hours. That makes me think of some possible implications — we might need another, more powerful server here to tackle with all this traffic. :)

Oh, one thing I would like to warn our Linux users still running stanalone (I mean taken from TGZ) version of BlogBridge 2.7 Stable. This version will successfully detect the update, but the “Download” button will be disabled. It happens because 2.7 wants to see Debian package but it’s not available. Starting from the version 2.13 the default package for Linux users is TGZ which makes more sense as it’s quite general and fits well every distribution.

Have fun!

Pito has just told me that the a book “Wicked Cool Java” by Brian D. Eubanks is already available. You can find the review on Slashdot or visit the official site to get more information. In this post I won’t dive deep into details, but will just say why it’s so exciting personally to me.

In the Chapter 4 “Crawling the Semantic Web” the author mentions the project I’ve been involved in as an active contributor for more than two years already — Informa. Informa is the news feeds parsing library with several utility modules greatly simplifying life, own persistence layer with mappings for several most popular database engines, RSS/Atom parsers, exporters etc. In his fourth chapter the author mentions and gives examples of how to use Poller module which is one of my beloved children as well as Cleaner and Persistence Manager.

Well, what can I say!? It’s WICKED COOL and I’m really proud of it even though it looks like there’s no direct mention of me as an author of the modules. ;)

Have a good reading! And go grab the book at Amazon!

Today I had some new interesting testing task. What I needed was to ensure that some method has public and non-static signature. The method plays role of hook in OPML import utility class — the hook, which is used to create Reader object for a given URL. By default, it uses simple InputStreamReader wrapper, but the client application may wish to have something more sophisticated. So, the task was clear — to ensure that this method does not lose its signature, because it already happened once when I was reviewing the code and noticed that this method had unjustified public modifier. That time I changed it to “private static” and the application using this library lost its encoding detection skills.

Today, when I was looking for a bug in encoding detection it was a sort of revelation to see that the code even doesn’t get called. Yeah, sort of blown off the entire leg instead of simply shooting off the boots. So, traditionally I fixed the signature and put some warning for the future, but… the next thought was how to make an automated test to be one hundred per cent sure about it. It appeared simple and I would like to share it with you just to encourage.

public class ImporterTest extends TestCase
{
  // lots of other stuff skipped ...

  public void testCreateReaderForURLDefinition()
    throws NoSuchMethodException
  {
    Method crfu = Importer.class.getMethod(
      "createReaderForURL", new Class[] { URL.class });

    assertEquals("Method should be public and non-static.",
      Modifier.PUBLIC, crfu.getModifiers());
  }
}

Easy and bulletproof.

Today we release the next version of BlogBridge under the code name “The Publisher”. What makes it special is that it finally has Reading List Publishing support. Yahoo!

Reading Lists publishing became really accessible now and you even don’t need your own site for that as we will host and take care of the load, we will pay for your traffic and do maintenance for you. Everything for your purest enjoyment!

All you need is a service account, which is free for now. Now check out the quick tutorial by our lead — Pito — and start publishing like crazy! What? Still reading!?

Among other things we have significantly improved our synchronization service, performance of some operations and made several tweaks noticeable to Mac users. But still the Publishing support is the major one.

Don’t forget to tell us about your experience via embedded feedback facility (see Tools), or via forum, or contacting us directly, whatever fits best. And… enjoy!

We all know how it’s bad to download illegal copies of music pirated by someone else, but we are not rich enough to get all what we want in a legal way, unfortunately. Yeah, nothing new here.

What I saw this morning was an announcement of a “Detroit Digital Vinyl” store, specializing on Detroit techno. The store works with several well-known techno labels and sell tracks in high bit rates (192 / 320 kbit) or even in raw WAV format if you need. Plus they have high bit rate prelistening, plus they offer some bonus tracks which are not available on the original vinyl, and plus, and plus… Yes, and the tracks they provide aren’t rips of the original plastic, they are original digitally mastered copies free of clicks and noises!

Amazing!

Go check out Detroit Digital Vinyl.

I never payed too much attention to what is in the spam messages I get. Well, until this morning. I briefly scanned the spam from two last days and was surprised with what I discovered. I am winning in at least two lotteries daily, each of which brings me about a million. Now look at it from the funny side.

It’s inconceivable how cool am I that I even don’t bother watching what and when I win, putting it in spam folder all together? I’m just too lazy to grab all this cash. :)

Have a good day… and see you soon!

Well, it’s been a long while since I wrote to this blog for the last time. Not that I’m lazy, really, I was distracted by some other shiny objects. These first few days of the year are always deciding. How you do them decides how the whole year will go… and I worked my fingers to the bone to make them full of action.

I finally finished my detroit-technoish track for the party that will take place this Saturday in Simferopol. It sounds just gorgeous and matured, yet for some mysterious reason Kate doesn’t like it. Maybe she is just a bit jealous about it? Who knows? Anyway, I’m going to send out a promo to various techno labels once I finish the other no way less exciting pounding groove I started already. That would be a nice couple!

Well, other news… We were making some A1-format posters again for the party performance. Now it’s not printed pictures we took in heavy technological zones, but something slightly different. I created a very simple minimalistic picture made of lines and shapes and Kate created a collage this time. It looks interesting. It’s a mix of her shots in grayscale with lots of small and even smaller details all over the canvas. Hope the guys at the party will like that.

And of course there are very interesting and promising changes in the BlogBridge world. You can learn more about them from the dedicated blog.

Oh, almost forgot… Here’s the quotation by George Aiken I saw some days ago and I really like it:

If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon.

That’s all news for today. Until next time!