FindComputerStuff

I have found another way of making posts and monitoring changes to other blogs, too, without visiting my website. I have been spending too much time playing around with WordPress and I am afraid it’s starting to affect my work. I try to post in my blog and then I notice something on the web page, and I start tinkering with the templates again - such compulsive behaviour! Besides, my colleagues at work are beginning to notice that I always have that website open in front of me and wonder if I am in any way associated with the madness on these pages (they think I am quiet, prim and proper, lol).

wBloggar

I stumbled across w.Bloggar some days ago and decided to try it out. It’s a neat piece of software, really. It communicates with your blog using the XML-RPC API provided by the blog platform/software. It works with Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal, TypePad, MovableType, Drupal, MSN Spaces and a whole plethora of blogging platforms out there. And you know me, the software is definitely freeware!

It was developed in Visual Basic 6 (surprisingly, some people still use it!), and it makes use of the XML-RPC Activex Component by Jan Sijm. There are actually two versions now, one uses the Mozilla HTML renderer Activex component for the preview post feature, and the other with our well-known MSHTML Control. Being my anti-internet-explorer self, I downloaded the mozilla version even though it was 6MB - three times larger than its Microsoft counterpart. Sadly, it was not able to show me a post preview using the gecko renderer, I don’t know why. So I had to go right back and pick the regular version.

I made my post on “changing themes” using w.bloggar, and it worked like a charm. The software actually retrieved my list of post categories, my default posting settings, even the option of allowing comments! Wow! I am hooked. If I had a Paypal account, I would readily make a donation to these guys who are making the use of the internet easier for lazy programmers like myself. Although it claims to be able to upload pictures and other files associated with the post, I haven’t been able to test all of its features .

w.Bloggar - Screenshot

The only issue I have with it, is that if there’s a delay in the connection, the entire application just freezes (I assume they would make it an asynchronous or non-blocking procedure), whiting out the whole window. It made me wonder whether it had crashed. The documentation is absent also, and the only help I could get was a sparse FAQ list on the w.bloggar website.

Newzie

Newzie is simply a feedreader with a difference: it not only monitors newsfeeds (in my case, RSS and Atom feeds from my friends’ blogs), it monitors webpages for changes too. And it colourizes the incoming items according to time, so you know at a glance what the ‘hottest’ item is, and it notifies you through a small news ticker on your desktop. Yes, it’s freeware, too!

Newzie - ScreenShot

There’s not much to say about it, I’ve had it around for a while but I just never thought it would come in handy. I initially used it with CNN news but I got tired of reading about this war and that catastrophe and this crisis and that political figure, every 5 seconds. Now that my blogroll is growing, I have added the feeds on my bloglist page to newzie, so don’t be surprised, guys, if I am always the first person to read your post and make a comment!

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