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.
No guarantees that I’ll keep the list up to date, but it’s easy enough to do that it shouldn’t be a problem (unlike the iPodder.org educational directory, which is a tedious pain in the ass to maintain – which is why I’ve neglected it for months)
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.
No guarantees that I’ll keep the list up to date, but it’s easy enough to do that it shouldn’t be a problem (unlike the iPodder.org educational directory, which is a tedious pain in the ass to maintain – which is why I’ve neglected it for months)
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:
- “Starz”. I can mark feeds as having a 0-5 star rating, and then I can build “Smart Feeds” that list items from all feeds (or a subset of feeds) that are within a range of Starz ratings.
- Smart Feeds – most other reader apps have these now, but these really shine when combined with Starz. I’m so totally addicted to this method of filtering content – I’ve had iTunes doing the same thing for a couple of years now.
- “River of News” – David Winer appears to think he’s invented something called a River of News. It’s just a view of a feed (or set of feeds, or a set of items from various feeds) that displays every item together as if in a single flow of info. A river, if you will. Clever. (btw, Drupal 4.7’s “Organic Groups” module has an option called ‘River of News” for group content display… I’m just saying…) But, Blogbridge goes one step further, because you can easily toggle the amount of info presented in a River. There are three views – just the titles, titles + short excerpt, titles + entire content (that’s where I live). It makes it VERY easy to scroll through 200 items quickly, scanning the River as it passes through my screen.
- Integrated with del.icio.us. Most of the time, the only reason I open a post in my browser is to then add it to del.icio.us so I can find it later (or from another machine). Blogbridge lets me do that right from the River view. Now, the only posts I have to open in my browser are photos from Flickr that I want to mark as Faves.
- Reading lists. I can subscribe to an OPML file containing a set of feeds, and Blogbridge will ingest it and subscribe me to the feeds. It will also monitor the OPML file, and add new feeds as they are added, and ask me if I want to delete feeds that are removed from the file. A future version of Blogbridge will also let me publish sets of feeds as guides, making it really easy to share sets of resources.
So, in less time than it used to take me to “check in” on my RSS feeds, I’ve read my email, read all of my RSS feeds (exept for the Flickr feeds – that can wait), and written this blog post. Now, there’s still a few minutes to get ready for a morning of meetings…
Here’s a screenshot of my Blogbridge setup. I’ll annotate the version in Flickr to describe what bits are for.
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:
- “Starz”. I can mark feeds as having a 0-5 star rating, and then I can build “Smart Feeds” that list items from all feeds (or a subset of feeds) that are within a range of Starz ratings.
- Smart Feeds – most other reader apps have these now, but these really shine when combined with Starz. I’m so totally addicted to this method of filtering content – I’ve had iTunes doing the same thing for a couple of years now.
- “River of News” – David Winer appears to think he’s invented something called a River of News. It’s just a view of a feed (or set of feeds, or a set of items from various feeds) that displays every item together as if in a single flow of info. A river, if you will. Clever. (btw, Drupal 4.7’s “Organic Groups” module has an option called ‘River of News” for group content display… I’m just saying…) But, Blogbridge goes one step further, because you can easily toggle the amount of info presented in a River. There are three views – just the titles, titles + short excerpt, titles + entire content (that’s where I live). It makes it VERY easy to scroll through 200 items quickly, scanning the River as it passes through my screen.
- Integrated with del.icio.us. Most of the time, the only reason I open a post in my browser is to then add it to del.icio.us so I can find it later (or from another machine). Blogbridge lets me do that right from the River view. Now, the only posts I have to open in my browser are photos from Flickr that I want to mark as Faves.
- Reading lists. I can subscribe to an OPML file containing a set of feeds, and Blogbridge will ingest it and subscribe me to the feeds. It will also monitor the OPML file, and add new feeds as they are added, and ask me if I want to delete feeds that are removed from the file. A future version of Blogbridge will also let me publish sets of feeds as guides, making it really easy to share sets of resources.
So, in less time than it used to take me to “check in” on my RSS feeds, I’ve read my email, read all of my RSS feeds (exept for the Flickr feeds – that can wait), and written this blog post. Now, there’s still a few minutes to get ready for a morning of meetings…
Here’s a screenshot of my Blogbridge setup. I’ll annotate the version in Flickr to describe what bits are for.
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.
I took another quick look at Shrook, and while I like many things about it (the paned UI that pans out of the way as you drill down) it just doesn’t offer the innovative coolness that BlogBridge is working on…
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.
I took another quick look at Shrook, and while I like many things about it (the paned UI that pans out of the way as you drill down) it just doesn’t offer the innovative coolness that BlogBridge is working on…
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 been using Blogbridge for the last couple of months, and it’s a really nice app. I just got tired of command+tabbing back to it after hitting a link, and having my RAM sucked up by Java’s greediness.
Things I prefer in Vienna over Blogbridge:
- Performance – despite the claims of awesome performance for a Java app, BB was always just a little slow, and sucked up terabytes of RAM. Well, not quite terabytes, but an unholy proportion of my system’s available resources went to sustaining BB.
- Pages sent to the browser actually open in the background as they should. Man, it’s annoying having to command+Tab after hitting a link every. single. time.
- Searching. BB doesn’t have a search tool. WTF? That’s kinda the point of having a local database of posts, no?
Things I’ll miss about Blogbridge:
- Feed suggestions – found LOTS of great new feeds using that feature, which spiders my current feeds and their posts to find relevant links that I’m not subscribed to.
- Starz. Much more granular to be able to apply a 0-5 star rating to a feed or post, rather than just marking as flagged.
- Star ratings on feeds. I really like having posts ranked higher based on the priority I’ve given to the source. Wonder if that’s possible to reproduce using some kind of smart feed in Vienna…
- Flickr feed handling – rather than just displaying these feeds as straight RSS subscriptions, it presented a form of photo album view. Very cool.
- The combined view, showing full posts of all feeds in one place, rather than having to cycle through individual posts. It’ll just take some getting used to – might be more efficient with separate post view anyway.
My switching to Vienna isn’t a mark against Blogbridge at all – it’s great software, and I totally recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a reader. It’s also not a permanent switch – I’m apparently pretty non-commital when it comes to software, since I just have to keep going and trying the shiny new toys as I come across them. I’ll be keeping my eye on Blogbridge, since they’ve got a lot of cool ideas in the works.
In a further flip-flop, I’m trying Firefox yet again, after being forced to do so after my WordPress 2.0 upgrade exposed a funky cookie-related bug that makes Safari kinda unusable for me (oddly, since it’s working fine for King in his new WP installation…).
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 been using Blogbridge for the last couple of months, and it’s a really nice app. I just got tired of command+tabbing back to it after hitting a link, and having my RAM sucked up by Java’s greediness.
Things I prefer in Vienna over Blogbridge:
- Performance – despite the claims of awesome performance for a Java app, BB was always just a little slow, and sucked up terabytes of RAM. Well, not quite terabytes, but an unholy proportion of my system’s available resources went to sustaining BB.
- Pages sent to the browser actually open in the background as they should. Man, it’s annoying having to command+Tab after hitting a link every. single. time.
- Searching. BB doesn’t have a search tool. WTF? That’s kinda the point of having a local database of posts, no?
Things I’ll miss about Blogbridge:
- Feed suggestions – found LOTS of great new feeds using that feature, which spiders my current feeds and their posts to find relevant links that I’m not subscribed to.
- Starz. Much more granular to be able to apply a 0-5 star rating to a feed or post, rather than just marking as flagged.
- Star ratings on feeds. I really like having posts ranked higher based on the priority I’ve given to the source. Wonder if that’s possible to reproduce using some kind of smart feed in Vienna…
- Flickr feed handling – rather than just displaying these feeds as straight RSS subscriptions, it presented a form of photo album view. Very cool.
- The combined view, showing full posts of all feeds in one place, rather than having to cycle through individual posts. It’ll just take some getting used to – might be more efficient with separate post view anyway.
My switching to Vienna isn’t a mark against Blogbridge at all – it’s great software, and I totally recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a reader. It’s also not a permanent switch – I’m apparently pretty non-commital when it comes to software, since I just have to keep going and trying the shiny new toys as I come across them. I’ll be keeping my eye on Blogbridge, since they’ve got a lot of cool ideas in the works.
In a further flip-flop, I’m trying Firefox yet again, after being forced to do so after my WordPress 2.0 upgrade exposed a funky cookie-related bug that makes Safari kinda unusable for me (oddly, since it’s working fine for King in his new WP installation…).
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.
My only remaining nits with BlogBridge are that it doesn’t seem to respond to the feed:// protocol – if I click on the blue “RSS” bullet provided in the address bar of Safari, BlogBridge pops to the front, but doesn’t do anything (at least visibly). The other nit is that if I click a link in BlogBridge, it brings my browser to the front. Annoying if I’m just wanting to preload a dozen or so tabs to read after scanning my feeds…
But, a great job by the folks at BlogBridge! I’m loving it. (cue J.T.’s million-dollar-jingle)
ps. Pito: I tried to leave this as a comment on your announcement post – but got a MovableType “missing file” error when posting the comment. Not a bad spam-blocker 😉
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.
My only remaining nits with BlogBridge are that it doesn’t seem to respond to the feed:// protocol – if I click on the blue “RSS” bullet provided in the address bar of Safari, BlogBridge pops to the front, but doesn’t do anything (at least visibly). The other nit is that if I click a link in BlogBridge, it brings my browser to the front. Annoying if I’m just wanting to preload a dozen or so tabs to read after scanning my feeds…
But, a great job by the folks at BlogBridge! I’m loving it. (cue J.T.’s million-dollar-jingle)
ps. Pito: I tried to leave this as a comment on your announcement post – but got a MovableType “missing file” error when posting the comment. Not a bad spam-blocker 😉
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.
Oh, and here’s a first shot at using Flock’s built-in Flickr integration in the blog post tool:
Hmmm… Looks like it did something weird when talking to my WordPress blog. Had to go in and manually re-publish this post. I’ll play more later…
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.
Oh, and here’s a first shot at using Flock’s built-in Flickr integration in the blog post tool:
Hmmm… Looks like it did something weird when talking to my WordPress blog. Had to go in and manually re-publish this post. I’ll play more later…
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:
The “more…” button displays an offset menu of options: “Only Load” and “Only Save” – but the status shows values for “Last Sync In” and “Last Sync Out” – is loading in? out? Is saving going to the server, or saving from it? Also, only one l in successful 😉
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:
The “more…” button displays an offset menu of options: “Only Load” and “Only Save” – but the status shows values for “Last Sync In” and “Last Sync Out” – is loading in? out? Is saving going to the server, or saving from it? Also, only one l in successful 😉
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.
There are a few quirks that I’m documenting, and I’m working up a wishlist as I use the app. It’s so far the closest thing to my mythical “perfect aggregator” that I’ve seen. Highly recommend it – even moreso when the next version is released (I’m using the weekly build, not the “stable” one. I’m sure there are lots of cool features that I haven’t discovered yet, too…
It is using an ungodly amount of RAM, though…
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.
There are a few quirks that I’m documenting, and I’m working up a wishlist as I use the app. It’s so far the closest thing to my mythical “perfect aggregator” that I’ve seen. Highly recommend it – even moreso when the next version is released (I’m using the weekly build, not the “stable” one. I’m sure there are lots of cool features that I haven’t discovered yet, too…
It is using an ungodly amount of RAM, though…
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.
It doesn’t come with a “new items only” view, but it’s simple to create a new SmartFeed for that. Also, it’s java, so performance can be pretty sucktacular – but that might be a side-effect of having 400 feeds in it… (actually, I’m down to 366 – BlogBridge choked on several feeds on importing my subscriptions from OPML – but that may be a result of dead/invalid feeds and BlogBridge may just be more vocal about that than NNW or Safari)
(Click for larger view)
Update: I also tried RSSOwl, but it just pegged my CPU to 100% for 20 minutes with no visible sign of doing anything productive. Force Quit.
I’ve been configuring BlogBridge for a few minutes, and am really impressed with some of the unique features. If I can get a “new items only” view as a default, rather than just another SmartFeed, I’m very likely to switch to it. It also helps that it’s free and open source, and the developers appear to have a healthy sense of humour as well. Actually, I’m going to try switching to BlogBridge for a week to see how it works out. If it winds up sucking up 4GB of VM or something, or the java performance penalty is too great, I’ll switch back to Safari or NNW (or something else?).
Update: I’m trying the “Feed Discovery” tool of BlogBridge – it can scan through your feeds and find others that you might be interested in. Holy. Crap. It’s finding stuff that I’d never heard of before, but is totally interesting. Not helping me with reducing the infoaddiction, though. Damn you, BlogBridge! 🙂
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.
It doesn’t come with a “new items only” view, but it’s simple to create a new SmartFeed for that. Also, it’s java, so performance can be pretty sucktacular – but that might be a side-effect of having 400 feeds in it… (actually, I’m down to 366 – BlogBridge choked on several feeds on importing my subscriptions from OPML – but that may be a result of dead/invalid feeds and BlogBridge may just be more vocal about that than NNW or Safari)
(Click for larger view)
Update: I also tried RSSOwl, but it just pegged my CPU to 100% for 20 minutes with no visible sign of doing anything productive. Force Quit.
I’ve been configuring BlogBridge for a few minutes, and am really impressed with some of the unique features. If I can get a “new items only” view as a default, rather than just another SmartFeed, I’m very likely to switch to it. It also helps that it’s free and open source, and the developers appear to have a healthy sense of humour as well. Actually, I’m going to try switching to BlogBridge for a week to see how it works out. If it winds up sucking up 4GB of VM or something, or the java performance penalty is too great, I’ll switch back to Safari or NNW (or something else?).
Update: I’m trying the “Feed Discovery” tool of BlogBridge – it can scan through your feeds and find others that you might be interested in. Holy. Crap. It’s finding stuff that I’d never heard of before, but is totally interesting. Not helping me with reducing the infoaddiction, though. Damn you, BlogBridge! 🙂
