Noizeramp

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  • BB Plug-in: Pins Archive

    27 April 2007 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ blogbridge
    Many times I felt that I wish to mark some article I stumbled upon to get back to it later, or what’s better to save it somewhere for continued reference. There’s no doubts there are many of us in this club. As you may know, I’m working for BlogBridge these days. Recently, we added a shining new wonderful plug-in framework that lets you or any 3rd party coder extend the functionality almost in a boundless way. Personally, my head is swelling with ideas to the point of explosion. That’s the main reason I’m starting the page where I publish extensions I write for the application. Be sure, I use them actively myself, so that’s not just a metaphysical exercise — it’s very serious stuff. Treat it accordingly. :) Alright, that was a bit of introductory blah-blah, and here’s the real meat: Main BlogBridge Plug-ins Page Pins Archive 1.0 Plug-in You can find the details on the plug-in page, but trust me, it’s that you always needed.

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  • BlogBridge 2.14 Weekly Released

    24 February 2006 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ blogbridge

    Just willing to double the official announcement here to let my exclusive readers know. The new version of BlogBridge with lots of fun features is out and I encourage everyone to jump to it as it’s faster, understands badly formed feeds better, has smaller footprint and simply more fun to use.

    The details you can find in the official announcement posted by me on our main product site. There’s also a bunch of links in it for your exploring pleasure. So don’t put it off until it’s too late… and new version is out. :)

    Try it and let us know what you think. Your opinion always matters!

  • River of News Concept

    17 February 2006 ⋅ 5 min read ⋅ blogbridge thoughts

    I was having some periodical brainstorming sessions on River of News Concept throughout the whole day today. By itself, the concept is very simple: you just need a newspaper-like list of articles to scroll through. The question is where do you get these articles or news items?

    The first level is definitely a feed. Any feed has several items in it, or it isn’t a healthy feed. Having the feed displayed as the list of complete article bodies rather than only their titles, you get a newspaper-like look of it which makes it easier for you to quickly review what’s on. This is what BlogBridge and some other aggregators do perfectly. And now we are close to some more interesting stuff…

    The next step is to combine several feeds in one more wide river with more news drifting by. The most natural way of doing this is to group feeds you like and create “the river” for this group or, speaking in terms of user interfaces, click over the group itself to see every article of every feed in that group. In my opinion, though I’m not a usability expert by any means, this approach is slightly limited. It doesn’t allow me to create several “rivers” with different filters and properties for the given set of feeds. Of course, it will work fine for some time and I’ll be pretty satisfied until I realize that it could be better. For example, I might wish to have a river for today’s news only, the small stream with articles about my favorite tool etc. Having tens of feeds merged together into the same unfiltered stream is the most short path to drowning.

    What I’ve learned so far is:

    • I need a way to join several feeds together into one virtual feed which I could quickly run through and get the most interesting content for me.
    • I need a way to apply filters to control what’s in this feed.

    Pretty simple, yet advanced requirements. At this point, I started to check what our BlogBridge project is missing in order to fulfill my criteria and it comes that not too much. There are several loose ends in Search Feeds (type of Smart Feeds) functionality not allowing me to fully enjoy this whole news drifting stuff:

    First and foremost, is that I can’t group all feeds from one guide. Actually I can since today as I implemented it by adding Guide Title property to the Search Feed query builder.

    The second is it’s still not convenient to read the news. Any Search Feed should be supplied with the limit value — the number of articles it can have on display. When I have say 100 unread articles all over my subscriptions list and I create a Search Feed with some special criteria (like this: limit=10, status=unread) it shows me top articles only (10 in my case) as required. But when I mark them as read they aren’t being replaced by these in the back list. From one side, it’s correct because if you mark something accidentally and it goes, you won’t be able to get it back easily. On the other hand, I can’t just sit and read — I always need to jump off and get back to the Search Feed again to get another portion of articles.

    So, as you can see, we are pretty close to the ideal river of news capable aggregator. There’s just one small step to make. Do you have any ideas on how it could be better to deal with this last problem?

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  • Blogrolling with BlogBridge

    15 February 2006 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ blogbridge

    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!

  • BlogBridge 2.13 Stable Released

    9 February 2006 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ blogbridge

    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!

  • BlogBridge 2.12 — The Publisher

    25 January 2006 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ blogbridge

    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!

  • BlogBridge 2.9 Weekly is out

    7 December 2005 ⋅ 3 min read ⋅ blogbridge

    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.

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  • OPML Format Standard and BlogBridge

    21 November 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ blogbridge

    Nowdays there’s a big discussion is open about what is required to be added to the OPML standard and how it should be updated to cover most of today’s needs of feed aggregators, messangers and other OPML consumers and producers of all kinds. The community is actively discussing possible applications and required attributes to be added here and there to cover them. That is what I call “a lot of fun” when expressing my point of view on Open Standards.

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  • BlogBridge gets forum and public bug tracker

    11 November 2005 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ blogbridge

    Yesterday we started the number of forums to help our users share their thoughts and worries with others. It’s exciting to see how people reacted to this innovation. We got our first ten users in a blink of an eye and most of them have been really active since the very first moments.

    Another interesting tool we made public recently is our bug tracker software we used internally. From now on you can report anything you like by simply typing it into the simple form. It’s convenient both for you and us to have it done this way. So, enjoy!

    Don’t hesitate to use either forum or bug tracket to share your thought and suggestions with us. We are always trying to be as responsive as possible.

  • Oh That Busy Friday!

    14 October 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ blogbridge

    Another busy week is over. During this week we received some valuable recognition from our users and I would like especially mark David Herron and his analysis of the BlogBridge performance evolution. It is always inspiring to hear responses of this kind. Thanks, David!

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