h0bbel.p0ggel.org

BlogBridge, the java based feed aggregator I've been praising in the past, has decided to turn their great BlogBridge service into a three-level plan where you can pay to get additional features. The three levels (Free, Basic and Publishing) offer different feature sets, and the paid levels are pre-paid for a three month period payable via PayPal or credit card.

Most users will probably find that the Free plan offer the feature set they want, so I don't see this as a bad move. In fact, I'm happy that this might actually turn into something profitable for the developers.

Pito

and Aleksey from the BlogBridge team sent me a very nice email a few days ago, informing me that I would be receiving a complimentary 2 year "Basic" BlogBridge Service Subscription, and I quote:

Because you have helped, supported, contributed or otherwise been a fan of BlogBridge we've set you up with a 2 year "Basic" BlogBridge Service Subscription. You will not notice a whole lot of difference to be honest, but it will let you continue to enjoy BlogBridge like you have in the past you won't be asked to pay anything.

Thank you Pito and Aleksey, all I did was to write about software I like and use on a daily basis. I certainly didn't expect to get anything in return.

In addition BlogBridge has decided to give a 3 month Free “Basic” Plan service account to everyone who has used the BlogBridge Service in the past, so no-one should be left out now that the service has changed.

A little while ago I gave up using BlogBridge, due to extreme resource utilization and general problems with it. The good developers behind the BlogBridge software responded quickly, and asked me to try out the weekly builds instead. I've been doing so for a week or so, and purposely just letting it sit in the background and not reading any of my feeds to make sure the unread count was high. Armed with the java debug console I tried reproducing the issues I was having with the 3.0.x version, and I'm very happy to report that the weekly build does not seem to suffer the same problems. I can finally go back to using BlogBridge as my primary feed reader, something I'm very happy about.

I'm also impressed by the fact that the developers behind BlogBridge actually took the time to both comment and send me emails regarding this issue, trying to figure out what was going on. Not that I actually had anything useful to report back to them, as the issue isn't present in the weekly builds. Another very nice "feature" of the weekly builds, is that you can run it without actually installing it. When you download it, it's basically just a .jar file that gets executed within your Java environment. Very nice, as this also guarantees that you get updated code from the developers each time you run it.

Once again, I'm a happy BlogBridge user! While FeedReader 3 is a nice application, the lack of centralized syncronzation services makes it very tedious to use for people who use multiple computers on a daily basis.

I've been using Blogbridge as a feed reader for quite some time, at least since v2.something and it's been one of the first Java applications I've actually enjoyed using. Recently it's become increasingly slow, even hanging, on all of my computers, and I suspect it's due to the number of feeds and unread articles I have. Thats a problem that seems very hard to fix. I've tried unistalling, reinstalling, removing java, reinstalling java and so forth, but I always end up with the same results.

One of the best features of Blogbridge might actually be whats killing it. It has an online service that you can syncronize your feeds with, an excellent idea that lets you keep track of the same feeds spanning several computers as well as updating the read count as you go along. Fantastic feature, but it might very well be the feature that killed my Blogbridge enthusiasm at the same time. Since my unread count was pretty high, mostly due to a Digg feed and a few select Technorati feeds, the creeping slowness hit all my computers at once. That in turn makes it impossible for me to remove the feeds or even mark them all as read. So, there I am. Stuck on three seperate computers, all doing the Blogbridge syncronization dance and turning each other into a slow mess. Initially I blamed Java for all this, but it does seem like more of a Blogbridge issue than anything else.

Naturally, I started looking for a new feedreader, and found, Feedreader. Their website promises a free and lightweight reader, and that seems to be exactly what you get. Thankfully it also has opml support, so I was able to import my feeds from Blogbridge. After looking around a bit, I found that Blogbridge saves it's feeds locally in \documents and settings\username\.bb\final\backups, and after pointing Feedreader to that file all my feeds appeared in Feedreader. Naturally the read count was off, but there is not that much I could do about that.

After using Feedreader a bit, I have a couple of (small) issues with it:

• Online Syncronization

  
  Feedreader 3 doesn't offer the online syncronization service that Blogbridge does - Hopefully something like that will pop up in Feedreader too.

• No photo specific viewing setup

  
  Blogbridge has a viewing mode that differs from your normal feed view, where it displays photo feeds in a special way. I want that in Feedreader too.

But, all in all, Feedreader 3 offers what it promises. It's snappy, works well and it's not made in Java. So far so good!