DavePress

On my Vista-running laptop, I had FeedDemon installed, a super desktop based RSS aggregator. I’ve always been more comfortable using this type of app as opposed to a web based solution like Google Reader or Bloglines. When I don’t have my laptop with me and I need to use a public PC or a mobile device, I can still use the NewsGator onlie service, which syncs up with FeedDemon so I don’t end up having to read stuff twice.

When I got my MacBook, then, it was an obvious choice to download NetNewsWire, NewsGator’s desktop app for the Mac. I hoped it would be the equivalent of FeedDemon, but sadly it isn’t, for me. This is surprising, because both products are developed by the same community, and I would have thought that some of the innovations of FeedDemon would have filtered through to the Mac app.

Here are some things I’d really like to see added to NetNewsWire, that are already in place in FeedDemon:

• The ability to hide subscriptions with no new items: FeedDemon let’s me ensure that the only feeds that appear in view are those with something new to read. I can’t find this option in NetNewsWire, and it means I have to scroll through loads of empty feeds to get to the new stuff
• Newspapers: these are the different ways you can display feeds. For example, the way you look at a Flickr photostream feed is different from a standard text based blog. FeedDemon lets you set just how you want stuff presented. NetNewsWire, as far as I can tell, doesn’t
• Panic button: OK, so this is a very new feature to FeedDemon, but it’s super useful. If you have a huge backlog of feeds, the panic button lets you mark a certain amount of them read, leaving you with the current stuff. NetNewsWire needs this!
• Attention reports: FeedDemon provides you with loads of stats about what items and feeds you pay the most attention too. Useful stuff. Can’t find it in NetNewsWire

Any other NetNewsWire users out there? How do you find it in comparison to other apps?

John Naughton had a request from a friend for an alternative to MS Word on a Mac. John pointed him in the direction of TextEdit (Windows users, think WordPad), which comes built into OSX. One issue with this was the lack of a wordcount function, which was soon sorted by an extra little bit of software.

I’ve been doing some digging into Mac word processing, and here are some other options:

• AbiWord - standalone wysiwyg word processor
• NeoOffice - Mac friendly port of…
• OpenOffice - the open source MS Office challenger
• TextWrangler - for pure text editing, no frills or fancy fonts!

Incidentally, I also came across this page, which might prove useful.

I am trying to find all the software I need to make my Macbook as useful to me as my Vista laptop is. Obviously some things are made much easier, like making Skype calls (no longer any requirement for a headset) or video (built in camera, no webcam needed!), but others are proving hard. I need replacements for my social media toolkit.

So far, I have been having most difficulty finding a decent offline blog editor. I guess you might question why this is necessary when WordPress has a perfectly adequate built-in online one, but for some reason I find blogging a much calmer activity when using a desktop editor. I never claimed to make sense

So, I have downloaded MarsEdit, Qumana and Ecto and will be trying these out over the next week or so. I think it is going to be a compromise choice in the end, as it doesn’t look like any of them offer the functionality of a Windows Live Writer or a BlogJet. Ecto has already failed to publish this post once, and crashed, so I would say its days are numbered (not least because it also ballsed up the paragraphs on the post so I had to edit it online anyway. Grr).

Another hunt is for an FTP client, and on this score things are going much better, thanks to my Twitter buddies Laura, Ed and Jenny. I have downloaded Fetch, Transmit and Cyberduck and all seem perfectly adequate. Think it will come down to which I feel most comfortable using rather than functionality.

I have also installed Skype, something called Skitch which I think will let me take screenshots like SnagIt does, and something called TextWrangler for making notes with.

Yes, for the first time in my life, I have bought a Mac - to be precise, a MacBook with 2.2Ghz, 120gb hard disk and a paltry 1gb RAM. That will be the first thing to be resolved, I reckon, but I might wait til next pay day for that treat.

My initial thoughts are good, it seems quick and I got it up and running with no problems at all. It’s a lovely size, which makes it ideal for lugging about, which was my intention really when buying it. Installing software seems easy enough, and so far I have added:

• Firefox - natch
• NetNewsWire - RSS reader, a Newsgator product so it syncs nicely with FeedDemon on the PC. Doesn’t seem a patch on FD though - and how the hell do I hide feeds from view which don’t have new items? Grr.
• Marsedit - hoped this would be a useful replacement for Windows Live Writer and BlogJet, and while it has a nice way of managing images - especially from Flickr - it doesn’t even seem to have wysiwyg editing, which strikes me as being rather backward.

So, am impressed with the Mac, less so with the software. Any hints and tips gratefully received!

I was alerted by Neville Hobson’s tweet that a bug fix release of FeedDemon was available for download. This announcement came through the FD support forums, which I never look at, so am thankful to Neville for bringing it to my attention.

The upgrade fixes bugs like:

• New instance of FeedDemon loads with misleading “application is hung” error message when attempting to subscribe from Firefox (123414)
• Cyrillic characters don’t display correctly in FeedDemon’s desktop alert
• Buttons cut off on keyboard shortcuts dialog when running at 120dpi
• Exception when importing invalid OPML (123539)
• Exception after synching on Windows 98
• Exception in prefetch options when setting “max items to prefetch” (124117)
• Wrong/ugly colors in newspaper header with some XP or WindowBlinds themes (124000)
• Thousands separators missing from large numbers displayed in panic button dialog and elsewhere (123986)

The top one (my emphasis) was a big fix for me, as this was proving a major pain in the neck, as I mentioned here.

Notepad, as I am sure everyone knows, is a text editor that comes free with Windows. It’s very, very basic, but that’s part of its charm. I use it quite a lot, for quickly editing HTML or PHP pages, or sometimes just to strip the formatting from some text I am copying and pasting.

The trouble is that Notepad is sometimes a little too minimalist, and there are a number of free (as in beer, though sometimes as in speech too) replacements out there vying for your text. They offer functionality such as allowing much larger file sizes than Notepad can, having more than one file open at a time, and some fancy scripting markup effects. Here’s a couple of examples of what text editors are out there.

(Please bear in mind that I am not wanting to generate some kind of mad Vi vs. Emacs text editor flame-war here! But please do leave a comment letting everyone know what your favourite text editor is )

• Notepad++
• Notepad 2
• TED Notepad
• Zulupad
• Metapad
• Notetab Light

Being a blogger is about far more than just words. To that end, you need tools which you feel comfortable with to enable you to create in any number of different media. Here’s some of the software I use to create my blogs and other online content. It would be cool to know what other options are out there, so do let me know what you use in the comments!

1. Firefox. My window onto the web. Of course, the various plugins I use make Firefox into a better tool for blogging. But that’s for another post…
2. FeedDemon. My RSS reader of choice. Of course, now it’s free, it should be yours too Being a desktop based reader, as opposed to web based ones like Google Reader and Bloglines, has a number of advantages - like downloading feed items to read when you are without the web - but to be honest I like it best because I am used to it. How pathetic is that?!
3. Windows Live Writer. This is a new one for me as I always used to be a BlogJet fan. But I gave the latest version of WLW a try a month or so back and I love it. How come MS can get some stuff, like this, so right - and yet others so badly wrong? Using an offline editor just works better for me that using the inbuilt WordPress online offering. One advantage is that I can write blog posts without an internet connection, like right now when for some reason the connection’s dropped…
4. Paint.net. A great free image editor. Much easier to use and more stable than the Windows version of the GIMP. Paint.net is easy to use and packed with features.
5. SnagIt. Lee Hopkins tipped me off to this one and it’s the most recent addition to my toolkit.Snagit is a great little bit of software that makes taking screenshots a doddle. No relying on the PrtSc key any more! Snagit lets you copy just a portion of the screen, or even an entire web page that scrolls a number of screens. You can then use SnagIt to resize, crop and add effects as you see fit without having to fire up another image editor.
6. FileZilla. A great little open source (free as in speech, as well as beer) FTP client.
7. Audacity. It’s always cool when an open-source bit of software is also one of the best available, and Audacity is one of those. An audio editor which makes producing podcasts child’s play.
8. BB Flashback. This lets me produce screencasts - videos of what I am doing on my PC screen. Great for producing demos and tutorials. Not sure if this is the best package on the market - lots of people use Camtasia - but this was more reasonably priced
9. Windows Movie Maker. OK, so I need to get some better video editing software
10. Evernote. A lovely note-taking application. It lets me clip things as I am browsing through the web, whether text or images. Handy for pulling together thoughts for blog posts.

Photo credit: Saffanna

There’s a bug with FeedDemon 2.6, I think.

Whenever I click the little orange RSS icon on the FireFox address bar to subscribe to a new blog, it tries to open a new FeedDemon window. Every. Single. Time.

This is a pain in the neck as I am never sure if I have actually subscribed to a feed or not!

Drupal is an open source content management system which is fully extensible through a huge range of community developed modules. It’s the system which powers the demo site I put together for The Information Authority last year, and it is as happy providing a platform for personal blogs as it is multi-user social networks. I will be focusing here on how it can be used to create a social media based community, allowing the sharing of various types of media including text, audio, video and images.

The open source nature of the platform means that not only is it cost free, but you also have carte blanche to edit the source code however you see fit, as long as you are willing to make the changes available to anyone else who might want them. So, if Drupal doesn’t do what you want, all you have to do is edit it so that it does – or get someone else to.

Some well known uses of Drupal include The Onion and Spread Firefox.

Basic Functionality

Drupal comes with a number of functions which are operational without having to track down additional modules. They include:

• Stories – the ability to post short news items to the site
• Pages – static pages with content that won’t change much
• Blogs – every user on a Drupal has their own blog, which can be viewed separately or aggregated together
• Forums – built in forum system allows for discussions on different topics
• Books – collaboratively author online collections of pages
• News Aggregator – built in aggregator which pulls together RSS feeds under various categories, making the latest news available to users
• Polls – simple polls on which users can vote
• Tagging – the powerful taxonomy feature allows all content to be tagged and presented as a tag cloud
• Profiles – you can specify fields for users to complete to build up a profile on the site
• Document uploads – all types of content (blogs, stories, pages, forum entries) can have file attachments added

On top of this there is a comprehensive user rights management system to ensure that only certain members can produce or view certain types of content, ensuring that your community is as secure as you need it to be.

There is, therefore, quite enough functionality available out of the box to get a community up and running very quickly.

Extra Modules

There is more that Drupal can do though, and all you need is to find the right modules to do it. Here are some of the ones I’ve picked out as being useful for community building:

• Photo gallery – whilst photos stored on public services like Flickr can easily be added to site posts, having your own photo gallery can be useful for privacy purposes
• Video – as with photos above. If a video isn’t on YouTube, they can upload it to your community site instead
• Audio – as above!
• Organic Groups – create groups within the community. Members can make posts visible only within groups or site-wide. Groups can be created by any user or just administrators
• Buddy lists – allow users to mark others as their buddies to help track their content etc
• Invite friends – allow users to send invites to friends not already registered
• Interests – tracks the tags employed by users to display other users with similar interests, as well as potentially interesting content
• TinyMCE – adds a wysiwyg editor to make creating content a little easier – no need for HTML tags!
• Links – create a social link directory with weblinks identified, described and tagged so others can find them

Themes

You can also change the look of your community with the freely downloadable themes from the Drupal website. Those included by default are all pretty good, especially Garland, but if you want to have a more individual looking site it might be better to find a less well known theme and customise it. Some good looking themes include:

• Bluebreeze
• Garamond
• Litejazz
• Deliciously Blue

Note that some themes require certain modules, or ‘theme engines’ installed to work properly.

What’s Missing

Drupal lacks a proper wiki module, which is a shame. The one that does exist is Liquid, which allows you to make any content as a wiki – in other words, making it available to edit by other users. However, this is a confusing solution and not one that is recommended at this stage. The only other option is to use the books module to collaboratively author content, but again this isn’t really perfect.

Drupal is also rather confusing to administer, and the learning curve is pretty steep. The best option is to play around with it first, and take your time. Once you become used to the way of doing things will Drupal, you’ll be amazed at the power and versatility of the system.

Conclusion

Drupal is a free out of the box solution to creating online communities that will have you up and running in no time. The learning curve is relatively steep, but it is worth it for the power and flexibility of the system.

This post has been shamelessly regurgitated from my old blog, FEConnect

Are, according to Download Squad:

1. Acrobat Reader
2. iTunes
3. Real Player
4. Internet Explorer
5. Outlook

Some pretty easy targets there. I use only iTunes out of this list on a regular basis, which I have to because I have an iPod, as far as I am aware. Otherwise I occasionally use IE for sites which don’t like Firefox, but that’s more or less it.

Instead of Acrobat Reader, which I agree is a total nightmare, I use Foxit Reader; and for Real Player I use GOM Player. My email is handled by Google’s Gmail interface.