Saturday, 18 February, 2006

Neville Hobson on FD beta 2

New FeedDemon beta released – actually, twice. Two versions came out on subsequent days this week.

Beta 2 of FeedDemon 2, the RSS aggregator for Windows, was released this week. If you’ve been testing FD’s development versions since release 1.5, this latest beta is worth getting.

I’ve just installed it and the first thing I notice is how much faster the application seems to be overall compared to beta 1. The release notes outline a long list of additions, changes and fixes since that first beta.

Sweet.

Another good move is that there is now a button on each post to blog that post, as well as sending it to del.icio.us. Sad thing is, the same button is used for both, and a little menu pops up to let you choose from blogging or del.icio.us. Couldn’t we just have two little buttons?

Qumana Beta 2 out now / BlogJet

Qumana Beta 2 has been released and it addresses the WordPress issue I (and many others) mentioned earlier.

I must say I have been hugely impressed with the way the Qumana people have engaged with those offering feedback on their product. So, to keep it coming, here’s some more suggestions:

  • Get Qumana to integrate with FeedDemon – the ‘blog this’ function doesn’t copy the text of the blog post like BlogJet does.
  • For users with multiple blogs, the default is always the first blog you set up. Perhaps the options could be to set either a constant default, or for the default to be the last blog you posted to.
  • It would be nice to be able to add a title element to hyperlinks.

Well, just three for now. But I am going to use Qumana to write the posts for a new blogging project I am working on, so I will be able to test it out some more.

I returned to BlogJet to write this post with, and noticed that several new versions have been released since I last checked. Not sure which features are new, but one I hadn’t noticed before was that it includes an auto-replace feature, that can be used to create the automatic parsing of links I mentioned in another post. Nice one!

Junk Email

So, I had a quick look last night at the bottom of my Gmail window – where it says how much space my emails are taking up. Was shocked that it was 25% of the 2695 MB available.

I thought this was pretty shocking – there’s no way I have that much email. Then I had a thought – for a long while a friend of mine had been forwarding those joke emails with huge attachments – up to 10 a day sometimes. After about a week of this I set up a filter to shove them all to ‘archive’, so my inbox didn’t get clogged up.

So, I searched for all these messages and deleted them all (now, that was a pain in the arse. Not least because I had to select them, delete them, then remove them from the trash; but because in search view, only 25 messages appear per screen, rather than the 100 per screen I have normally. That’s just idiotic.) And what was the result?

I am now down to 11% of my available space. More than half my quota was filled with these joke chain emails! I changed my filter from ‘straight to archive’ to ‘straight to trash’.

Friday, 17 February, 2006

Email and Blogging

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that it is a good idea for a blogger to have his or her email address easily accessible. But what about when that email address isn’t one that a reader would want to use?

I clearly mark the email link under my photo on the right as being a Gmail address. Some people don’t like Gmail, for a variety of reasons. So, really, you should offer an alternative. I try to do this with my Email page.

So far, so good. But what about the people I email? Remember, one of the problems people have with Gmail is that it stores mails more-or-less indefinitely. So, if I email them from my Gmail account, they are being forced into having their reply stored for ever more on a Google server somewhere, being used for God knows what. Now, I personally don’t care what Google do with my emails, and I like the interface so much I want to stick with it. But what about those that do?

So, I have amended my Gmail signature to include a line saying “Don’t want to reply to Gmail? Try me@davebriggs.net instead!”

This way, if people want to reply, but don’t want to have their email sucked into Google’s information empire, they can do. Sorted.

Thursday, 16 February, 2006

Qumana

Well, this is my first post with Qumana (Version 3 beta 1), a free desktop offline blog post editor. It’s pretty cool, though I do have some issues with it.

Feature wise, it does everything you would expect, offering a basic editor with the ability to format text, add links and images and so on; as well as more blog specific stuff like adding categories to posts and trackback URLs, etc.

Setting it up is very easy, and BlogJet could learn a thing or two from Qumana on this aspect. There’s no need to tell it what platform I am using, nor the location of my xmlrpc.php file. It sorts all that out for me. Cool. Also, the speed at which posts are visible on the blog is a lot quicker than BlogJet – which for some reason takes ages to appear.

Two features of Qumana stand out. One is the ‘droppad’ which sits on the desktop while Qumana is running, and onto which you can drag text and images. Then, the next time you create a new blog post, all that stuff appears automatically. Fairly cool idea, but in reality you are going to spend more time sorting out the formatting and layout of all this stuff you have dumped than you would if you had don it manually from the off. Second, Qumana offers a bespoke blog advertising programme called AdGenta which fills your blog posts with contextual adverts. Hmmm. Not one for me, I must admit.

The main problem for me with Qumana is the speed. It takes too long to load in the first place and then there seems to be some sort of weird delay when typing, which may have something to do with the spell checker. Also, for some reason, ctrl-backspace doesn’t delete a whole word. Grrr.

Overall, it’s interesting. For those who aren’t sure whether they need an offline post editor it is a good bet to try first, as it’s free. But BlogJet will still be my number one choice for speed and simplicity.

Powered by Qumana

Wednesday, 15 February, 2006

links for 2006-02-15

Tuesday, 14 February, 2006