Author: Jeffro

Jeffrohttp://jeffc.meEnjoy writing about, talking about, and helping others with WordPress
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The Best FeedReader Money Can Buy

Feed Demon Logo

Often times, I’m asked the question, “Which RSS FeedReader Do You Use“? I reply with “FeedDemon” which is then followed up with a response of “Feed What?”. I suppose no one knows of any other feed reader outside of Google Reader. I have Dave Gray, host of TheGlobalGeekPodcast to thank for pointing me towards FeedDemon. My first RSS reader was called SAGE which was an RSS Reader FireFox extension which allowed me to view my RSS feeds from within FireFox. Then, after I talked with Dave for quite awhile concerning RSS and how he manages to get all of the stories for his podcast, he told me about FeedDemon.

FeedDemon is commonly known as “The most popular Windows RSS Reader“. I’ll up the ante and call it the best reader money can buy. FeedDemon is a desktop based RSS aggregator that is currently only supported on Windows machines. So why is it the best?

FeedDemon has a wide assortment of features. One of those features is an online account with NewsGator.com. NewsGator.com is an online based FeedReader. Anything that you do within the desktop client can by synchronized to your online NewsGator account. This means that, whatever feeds you are subscribed to in FeedDemon, will be the same feeds you are subscribed to in your NewsGator online account. Each time you start or close FeedDemon, you’ll be giving the option to synchronize your account. This is awesome because, when you don’t have access to a machine with a copy of FeedDemon installed, you can use your online NewsGator account and never miss a beat.

accountsynching

FeedDemon begins to really shine once you end up subscribed to a bunch of feeds. If you are subscribed to a particular website, chances are you’re interested in that content. But FeedDemon has something called WATCHES. Watches provide a way to look for keywords in news items as they’re downloaded. For example, if you create a watch that looks for the word “election,” then every news item containing the word “election” will be stored in the watch. A watch searches only in feeds you’re subscribed to. I am subscribed to a number of feeds and have set up particular watches for the keywords, ICONS and Web Based Comics. Each time a post is published from a site that I am subscribed to with any of those particular keywords in the title or the content, they will show up in my watches folder. Now you know my secret as to how I find out about all of those icon packs being released on the web.

Watches

Another feature of FeedDemon that I really enjoy is called NewsBins. News Bins enable you to store news items in a central location, providing a handy way to collect items from different feeds. If you find an interesting item that you might want to read again, you can store it in a news bin for future reference. In my case, I have three particular news bins setup. One for my link blog, one for something I call WordPress weekly, and the last one is for stuff to write about. What’s neat about these newsbins is that you can share them as an RSS feed. That’s how I’ve been able to establish and update my link blog. I share my Link Blog newsbin as an RSS feed and have plugged that into the Simple Pie RSS plugin for WordPress. Check out ( How To Create A Link Blog ) if you want to do the same thing.

Newsbins

As for a built in browser, FeedDemon uses what looks like an edited version of Internet Explorer. The browser supports tabbed browsing, auto discovery of RSS feeds, Favorites, and a few other nifty features. This is all related to the actual web browser built in.

The actual RSS feed browser is a little different. You can browse by Full posts, Summaries or Headlines that can be grouped by Feed, Date or Title. The layout and presentation of the feedreader resembles a newspaper. The buttons from left to right are as follows: The envelope is the icon to trigger an item Read or Unread, the flag gives you a chance to flag an item. Flagged items stay around forever (or until you unflag them). The X icon deletes the specific item. The trash bin is actually the news bin icon that when clicked on, provides you a list of newsbins to copy the item to. The arrow icon is the SEND TO function. You can email the news item, copy it to your clipboard, publish it to your blog, or send the item to Delicious or Digg. The last icon will show you who is linking to that particular news story.

Newspaper Layout

Organization is handled via a folder structure. It is up to you to determine how you will organize your feeds via folders. I love organized feeds as it makes browsing through them much easier. Here is an example of how I’ve decided to organize mine. Each one of those blue numbers represents the amount of new posts for those feeds.

organizedfeeds

What I’ve given you in this review is actually just a small sampling of what this program is truly capable of. They call it the best FeedReader for Windows for a reason and it truly lives up to that claim. FeedDemon costs $29.95 which is insanely cheap if you ask me. This program has so many features and the built in online account synchronization stuff should make this thing worth $100.00 or more. If you really are interested in checking out this program, they do offer a Free trial which lasts for 30 days.

This is the feed reader I use. Which one do you use and why?

Human Tetris

I thought this was a well done video complete with sound effects and everything.

TETRIS played by real human-beings sitting in an auditorium: TETRIS is the 4th video performance of the GAME OVER Project, directed by the Swiss artist Guillaume REYMOND (NOTsoNOISY creative agency). This stop-motion video was shot and played for “LES URBAINES” festival www.urbaines.ch at the Palais de Rumine (Lausanne, Switzerland) on November 24th 2007. You can find also SPACE INVADERS, PONG and POLE POSITION on our website www.notsonoisy.com/gameover

Copyright Your RSS Feed With FeedEntryHeader

FeedEntryHeader is a WordPress plugin written by Stephen Cronin. Like so many other bloggers, Stephen has been battling the scraping issue. FeedEntryHeader provides WordPress bloggers with a way of adding a copyright statement and a link to the original article which will show up at the top of your feed entries.

Why the top and not the bottom? According to Stephen, the copyright that appears at the bottom of your feed entries has little impact because of it’s location. Also, if a splogger is scraping an excerpt of your content, chances are, the copyright statement won’t be added into the entry.

FeedEntryHeader screenshot

You can customize the text that is shown in the copyright area by changing the HTML and associated tags. However, the default message should be fine for most people.

As Stephen and the commenter’s on his blog note, this will not stop scrapers, but this is a step in the right direction. All WordPress bloggers should install this plugin as it provides another opportunity for us to fight back against these jerks.

Impressive Free Icon Sets By DryIcons

It’s not too often when you come across free sets of icons that have that professional look too them. DryIcons has at least 5 Free available icon packs that simply look gorgeous. One of my favorite packs by DryIcons, is the Ruby Multimedia set.

RubyMultimedia

This set features 13 high quality icons depicting media equipment such as a web cam, headphones, mouse, digital camera, ect.

Then, there is the WYSIWYG Sapphire icon set. These icons would be perfect for anyone developing their own WYSIWYG text editor. 47 icons are featured in this set.

Wysiwyg Sapphire

Next up is the WYSIWYG Classic set. This set is the same as the one above, except it doesn’t have that blue Sapphire touch.

wysiwyg classic

Blue Velvet is a high quality icon set that you would use on your own website. This set contains 86 icons and features buttons that can be used as a means of communicating a specific purpose.

Blue Velvet

Aesthetica is the big one. This set features 160 icons and contains everything from media player buttons, to all sorts of operating system icons.

Aesthetica

Happy Birthday SMS

HappyBirthday SMS

15 years ago, the first ever recorded cell phone based text message was sent, to an employee at Vodafone. The message was “Happy Christmas“. 15 years ago in the first week of December, Airwide engineer Neil Papworth sent the test message to Vodafone’s Richard Jarvis.

Fast forward to today, and everyone and their mother, no pun intended is text messaging. The BBC reports that SMS messages in Britain are being sent at a rate of one billion per week. Compare that with the U.S. where 10 billion text messages are sent every month and thats only on the Verizon network.

How many of those text message do you think involve Twitter?

Microsoft Working On XP For OLPC

Microsoft’s software engineers are “working hard” on a slimmed-down version of Windows XP for the One Laptop Per Child project, but company officials say there is still much work to be done. James Utzschneider, GM of Marketing and Communications of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group, says in his blog that contrary to earlier media reports that XP doesn’t yet run on the OLPC, but adds that his team has been working on the operating system since the beginning of the year.

TG Daily

Here is an idea, just slap on Windows Vista Home Basic and you’re pretty much covered. Besides, Vista Basic is a glorified version of XP anyways so it shouldn’t be that difficult. Also, theres not much to slim down in Vista basic. The only reason I can think of for them not using Home Basic is that, it’s TOO stripped down and instead, they would have to ADD things to it.

Man on cell phone killed by train

A pedestrian apparently absorbed in a cell phone call was struck and killed by an Amtrak train in San Leandro today after he walked around a lowered crossing gate and onto the tracks, authorities said. The victim, a man who was not immediately identified, was struck at 12:30 p.m. by a northbound Capitol Corridor train at the Alvarado Street crossing, about 8 miles south of the Oakland station, Amtrak spokeswoman Vernae Graham said.
Man talking on cell phone killed by train in San Leandro

Hmm. Since this happened in the States, there is a high probability that some sort of lawsuit may come out of this. On the other hand, how in the world does a cell phone conversation become so engrossing that you can’t hear the train horn going off? The man actually walked around the lowered gate. At that point, you have to think the guy knew a train was coming or else the gate wouldn’t of been lowered?

What do you guys think? Legitimate or suicide?

Whats Up With Migratr

MigratrLogo

Alex has written a post detailing what’s been going on in terms of development for his nifty online photo migration tool – Migratr.

For 1.0 I’d REALLY like to have Webshots and Zooomr supported. Both are, however, being unusually silent regarding API keys. This is especially frustrating from Zooomr, as they posted to the dev group a month ago saying they were going to start handing out API keys, I put in a request, and STILL haven’t heard from them.

Migratr has evolved far beyond its original incarnation as a Flickr > Zooomr migration utility, but until I have Zooomr added to my roster, I won’t be able to consider Migratr a full 1.0 release.

Migratr is an awesome piece of software that lets you backup and migrate your online photos from one service to another, as long as support for that service is built into Migratr. If you want to read a detailed review of this software check out ( Migratr – Backup And Migrate Your Online Photos ) In fact, I used this program 15 minutes ago to download all of the photos I have hosted on my Flickr account.

Get A Mac Misprint

Recently, PC World did a piece on how the fastest notebook to run Windows Vista was a Macbook Pro. Since that article has made it into the public, the Apple marketing department has jumped all over the opportunity to cash in on the review.

If I were Microsoft, I’d get Apple off my back and disable any way for an Apple based machine to run Microsoft software, including anything in a virtual environment. Microsoft can’t run Mac software, but Mac can run Microsoft software. Someone needs to pimp slap Steve Jobs.