This week I have been using FeedDemon to read blogs. Having tried several other aggregators in the past months I think I have found my toy of desire. FeedDemon is a delight to work with, the UI is beautiful and it is full with nice little features. If I had to mention one of them, it is the way auto-discovery works. FD has an embedded browser. This collects feeds found while browsing, clicking the menu item (or icon in the bottom right corner) FD will show a list of feeds it encountered on the pages you browsed. Just click one of them to add a channel. If I had to mention a second thing it would be the embedded browser itself, which has more working functionality than the average embedded browser. For instance : the back and forward buttons of my keyboard (and in thew previous beta also those of my mouse) do work. As well as the <F11> key. And last , but not least, the browser is tabbed. Instead of opening a new browser window FD creates a new browser tab.
There is a new beta of FeedDemon available. Give it a try and take some time to browse the site as well. The author, Nick Bradbury, is no newbie.
Writing a weblog is a science on itself. The .text admin offers a lot of possibilities to customize you blog-page. It's all there and works well. But when it comes to writing the messages themselves I frequently run in trouble. The first reason for that is my own stupidity. It is tempting to write your story online, the editor looks good. But when you browse around while writing, to find a quote or link, there is always the risk of browsing away from the admin-page you are writing on. Before you know it all your work has disappeared into thin air. Without a warning. I have also tried .text to publish an article. Editing longer texts can be hilarious. After adding a snippet of C# code the whole article might turn blue. A small update on the story led to an even better result, linking to the article now produces a .net exception. The article is gone.
Now I am writing my posts using FrontPage. The good thing is that FP checks my spelling. When the text is ready I copy the text from the HTML view of FrontPage to the html view of the .text admin. Which works well, except for any <'s or >'s in your text. I will host the lost article (preview) on my own web-site and start organizing all the links with .text. No problem with that.
Blog on,
Peter