What is BloggerBuddy?
BloggerBuddy is an application designed from a blogger for bloggers. It actually is a tool that will help you organize your feeds in a more productive way. The idea behind it is a blogger that visits blogs to see what their friends post and leave comments. With this little application this process will be sagnificantly simplified and let you focus on the content rather on site visiting.
Why BloggerBuddy?
A very good question would be why BloggerBuddy and not any other RSS reader / aggregator? I have used and tested quite a few before deciding to do this small application. All the ones i tested organize the feeds by site they are taken of. BloggerBuddy organizes them in a "timeline" something like a stream. This will give you the opportunity to track down your friends' posts in the chronological order they are posted allowing you not to loose any post!Download Beta v0.5.1
BloggerBuddy is FREE and it is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Current stable version of BloggerBuddy is "Beta v0.5.1". This means one thing. There might be a glitch somewhere i haven't seen before but this is an unlikely event since i am using this program in my daily blogging basis and it performs very well. If you do find a bug why not report it using the "Feedback"?. Keep checking this place and keep an eye to my blog's special category about BloggerBuddy for new releases and patches.
Download here
Installation
BloggerBuddy is an application created using the framwork "Adobe AIR". In order to install and run BloggerBuddy you need that framework. It's free to download here. Having air, in Windows systems the installation of BloggerBuddy is as simple as double clicking on the .air package you downloaded above. On a Linux / Mac system you should make sure to use the "Adobe AIR installer" program. Just launch that, choose the .air package you downloaded from here and the installation will begin! Send the dog out and have fun reading!
Updating
If you already have BloggerBuddy installed then before installing the new release please make sure you keep a backup of your data. This is done simply by copy-pasting the "data.db" file from the home folder of the installation in a temporary folder (Desktop maybe?), update then and finally put back the data.db file replacing the one that BloggerBuddy brought by default. If you fail to do that then you will end up without any blog in your list and no content in your feeds (beleive me i've been there!).Changelog
v0.5 (Beta) → v0.5.1 (Beta)- Fixed a sorting problem (sort by date descending) on the feed and search views (thanks to Sire for mentioning!).
- Added import feature from OPML files (tested with exports from Google Reader).
- Improved the loading of the feeds by adding the checked list instead of the simple counter.
- Added an edit feature to the blogs list.
- Added a cool search feature for content.
- Added the ability to click on blogs and filter content to get the one just from those.
Bugs / Suggestions
If you use BloggerBuddy and find some strange behaviour aka bug please report it back to me. Also, if you think some feature should be added for future releases i would love to hear about it! To do any of those use the "Feedback" button on the left. Make sure that when reporting a problem it is not recorded in the appropriate section below and when reporting a feature it is not already in the feature list (if it is vote for it!).Donate!
Although i created this for fun and for everyone to use, if you find it useful to you and it becomes an application you use in your daily internet experience, please consider donating. The smallest ammount will help me maintain and further develop BloggerBuddy.Known Issues
Here is a small list of issues i am already aware of and will be fixed on future releases:- On the "Commented" view not all the comments are loading. That is a known issue with some blogs and i am after the source of the trouble.
Documentation
Using BloggerBuddy is pretty simple and basic. No fancy thing around here, letting you focus on the essense of reading rather than program handling. Here is the basic scenario.
You open up "Feeds -> Add Feed" to add a feed you want to track down. This is an important step and you have to make sure of two things. First up is the Feed URL. As stated, this must be the feed URL. For instance, to add my blog's feed you need to add "http://www.stratos.me/feed/". Second thing you need to make sure is this. Some blogs want to make sure that their feed is served out of Feedburner, therefore they add a small redirection rule. When you request for their feed they redirect you to the Feedburner one. A browser is smart enough to interprit that. BloggerBuddy is not yet that smart (i don't know if he even needs to be!). So, when you try to add a feed make sure you view it first on your browser and then copy-paste that URL to BloggerBuddy. For instance, let's say you want to add the feed of "example.com". First fire up your web browser and visit "http://www.example.com/feed/". If a redirection rule exists, your address will change. In any case, once you see the RSS displayed, copy-paste the link.
Once you add a feed, BloggerBuddy will reload his feed storage retreiving all the feeds from the subscribed blogs. To manualy reload you should go to "Feeds -> Reload Feeds". At some point on the future this might happen automaticaly on a time interval but for now it's up to you. Now there are four views.
- "Unread" → This view is the most essential one. It has all the posts that are new in the reader. Once you visit them (or not) mark them as read and they will fall of to the "Read" view. Any new post will be marked as unread and displayed in this view.
- "Read" → This view keeps all the posts that you have marked as "Read". They are liable to removal from the Maintenance (see below)
- "Commented" → Any post you commented on and want to keep track of the comments, mark it as "Commented". That will make it fall in this view. Once you show posts from here, an extra thing will happen. BloggerBuddy will try to fetch the last commenter on the post and link to that comment. That way it makes it easy for you to track commented posts.
- "Archived" → This view keeps all the posts marked as "Archived". If a post is marked as "Archived" then it is not liable to removal on the next maintenance.
On "Maintenance -> Clear Read" you are able to remove all the posts that are marked as "Read" and not as "Archived". It is good to do so every now and then just to relief the database from clutter and help out BloggerBuddy perform faster. One more tip would be to keep a backup of the file "data.db" on the installation folder, every now and then. Even id something goes wrong replacing this file will bring BloggerBuddy up to his feet again.
One quick tip here. If you add a feed that is not valid for some reason (you forgot to add the "feed" on the end or check out that it does not redirect) then BloggerBuddy, uppon refreshing the list, will probably get stuck on the last one. To avoid this you can change your view. No need for restart. After that remove the feed and check out what could have gone wrong.
