Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

As much as a like the Blogbrigde feed reader, one thing has been annoying me since I am using it on Mac OS X: Opening articles in the browser always means changing the active application to the browser, so you cannot go through all new feed entries, open the interesting once in a background tab and read them afterwards.

This means unless you open the Blogbrigde preferences, select the section "Advanced" and select following command as Internet Browser:

open -g $URL$

The open command will open any URL in the default browser and the -g parameters tells Mac OS X not to raise the application to the foreground.

Yay! Blogbridge 6.0 is out and adds all the features I had to wait for because I did not dare to install the weekly builds (mainly due to the flaky Java Webstart support in Mac OS X). These new features include:

• built-in Meme tracker
• Statistics
• Plugin API

Now: Installing and reading feeds.

Recently I changed my RSS reader setup to reflect the new features in Blogbridge 5: I no longer subscribe to the various planets I have been reading: Planet Apache, Planet GNOME, Planet Mindquarry, etc., but combine the ability of the Planet software to create an OPML file, containing a listing of all blogs aggregated, including their feed URL. Blogbridge in turn is able to subscribe to all feeds mentioned in such an OPML file, so I pointed Blogbridge to the OPML files of Planet Apache, Planet GNOME, Planet Mindquarry, etc, unsubscribed from all aggregated Planet feeds and are now subscribed to really many feeds ( I get this aggregated listing by publishing the OPML of all my subscribed feeds using the Blogbridge service, combined with Share Your OPML, a great service by Dave Winer).

There was only one problem: I suddenly lost all my Planet Apache subscriptions due to a mis-formed OPML file. Planet Apache's OPML file did not contain the feed URLs, so I investigated this issue and found a small bug in the OPML template that mixed up url and uri variables and is fixed by now. As a result, feed urls are in Planet Apache's OPML again and my feed list is again a little bit more interesting.

In the last days I have been blogging a bit too much about Mindquarry, so here are three open source software releases you should not miss:

• BlogBridge 5.0 - BlogBridge is still the best open source desktop feed reader and with the addition of the new BlogBridge service which allows posting to your weblog directly from blogbridge. This makes it ideal for short-circuted information workers (remind me to blog about this concept)
• Eclipse 3.3M6 - another Eclipse milestone. This time with improvements for Mac OS X and Vista.
• Hudson 1.91 - with support for version control repository browsers. Currently there is FishEye, ViewCVS, and ViewSVN support. When I have time some day, I will write a plugin for Hudson that provides better integration with Mindquarry, I promise. I have already checked out the source code and built it once, but there is also a lot of other stuff to do, so this might take some time.

Check out this post from BlogBridge:

If you write or contribute to a blog or publish your work and commentary somewhere then we you will be interested to hear about the BlogBridge Pub Service. Ed: Yes, we did change the name from Pro to Pub after some feedback]

We’ve found that many of our users like BlogBridge for the same reason that we like it: you read (or follow) lots and lots of blogs and want to be as efficient as possible doing this. And why do you read so many blogs?

(from: Coming soon: BlogBridge Pub Service for micro publishers)

 This post was written using the new publishing feature in BlogBridge 4.4 (you need to use the weekly release, available for Java WebStart). And thanks to the stellar work of Aleksey Gureev and the BlogBridge team the latest 4.5 Snapshot of BlogBridge supports Roller, which allows you to publish to Goshaky Weblogs, JRoller.com, blogs.sun.com and many more.

Blogbridge 4.0 is out and it is great as always. It is one of the best RSS readers available, mostly due to the great blogbridge service that allows you to:

• use Blogbrigde cross-platform: Windows, Mac OS X and Java are supported.
• synchronize your reading lists: Blogbrigde supports OPML subscriptions (not only one-time import/export) and expert-powered reading lists by topic experts.
• synchronize read/unread state using the blogbridge service. This allows you to conveniently share the status of blog entries across multiple computers.
• tag posts using the blogbridge service or del.icio.us

The bottom line: Blogbridge is the ultimate info-junkie tool.

If you are running blogbridge on an Intel-based Mac, you may experience problems when starting BlogBridge which can be solved by issuing following command in the terminal:

cp /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Resources/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub 
  /Applications/BlogBridge.app/Contents/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub