RSS News Around the Blogosphere

The mission of MightyMerchant.com, it says on its website, is “to provide usiness owners with straightforward, comprehensive and affordable eCommerce services that produce positive financial results.” To that end, the blog, operated by Datahost Inc., uses RSS to get the message out. A recent post explains RSS and how to create and use RSS feeds. It’s a short, excellent look at the basics.

Those of you who use NewsGator Toolbar, be advised that there is an update available now that offers, as developer Nick Harris says, “a slew of bug fixes.” To find out more or download the update, click here.

And our developers for FeedDemon and NetNewsWire have each posted some tips and tricks of the custom feed reader trade. Brent Simmons has a series of posts titled Things You May Not Know About NetnewsWire in four categories: Browser Stuff; Reading Stuff; Subscriptions List Stuff; and Miscellaneous Stuff.

And not to be outdone, Nick Bradbury has just posted 10 Tiny FeedDemon Tips and Viewing Flickr Photos in FeedDemon. Since these are the guys who created and continue to feed and water these applications, you will pick up something new in these posts. I guarantee it.

More Improvements in NewsGator Online

You might have noticed a couple of changes to NewsGator Online in the last week. When you first sign in to your account, the page looks a bit different. There are a couple of new features. First, you can now tag articles, which allows you to organize and find clipped articles more easily. The top tags are now shown in a tag cloud on the right side of the page. Click on a subject in which you are interested and see what happens.

You can also sort articles by activity. After you select a feed or folder, you can click on the “Sort Order” option to “Sort by Activity.” This lets feeds that are being clipped, traded or shared by other users to rise to the top of your list.

And with more people starting to use our products, Keith Franklin of our ace support staff has written a forum post that answers many of the questions new users have. If you are new to RSS or NewsGator, it's worth reading to make sure you’re getting the most out of your subscription.

Using Winamp to Manage Podcasts in NewsGator

Especially since NewsGator products became free, our users have been finding new ways to improve their experience. Seth Rosenblatt over at the C/Net Download Blog has come up with a way to use the latest version of WinAmp (you read that correctly) and FeedDemon to keep your podcasts organized and up-to-date in Windows.

It takes a bit of configuring, but Rosenblatt has done his homework by “delving into the labyrinthine recesses of the WinAmp message boards” so you don’t have to. Read his excellent analysis and clear directions for implementation at the weblog. Thanks, Seth!

How Quickly Do Feeds Update in NewsGator?

We get a lot of questions about how fast feeds are retrieved and updated in NewsGator. In a time of almost instant communication, we all want the latest stuff, and we want it NOW.

Greg Reinacker, our CIO and founder, knows a thing or two about the NewsGator system, and he explains in detail how it retrieves feeds and why certain feeds get updated more quickly than others, in a recent post on his weblog. If you’re wondering why your latest post didn’t show up as quickly as you thought it should or why your favorite feed isn't updating, it’s definitely worth a read.

Celebs Blog; Some Are Even Good

We are a celebrity-obsessed culture. Many musicians, actors, directors, athletes, TV journalists, building owners and trust-funders are all known by their faces, or their first name.

So it is no surprise that some have taken up the weblog, in many cases just to create buzz for themselves or, in others, people who who actually keep an online journal. Our editorial staff came up with a list of celeb-blogs to which you can subscribe. Among the finds:

If you were a fan of Talking Heads, you would be no stranger to David Byrne, the enigmatic leader of that ancient quartet. Byrne writes a journal of his travels and interests, the latest posts being his trip to Aspen for a video tutorial and an account of a side-trip to the Museum of Jurassic Technology (where he finds a room filled with paintings of dogs the Russians sent into space during the early days of earth orbiting.) Entertaining and erudite, Byrne’s blog is as interesting and curious as the man himself.

Successful businessman and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban has a reputation for outspokenness and provocation. His Blog Maverick, certainly doesn't distract from the mystique. The headline on his latest post is “The Internet is Officially Dead & Boring – It’s the Economy Stupid.”

Pete Townshend reveals that what's left of the Who (Townshend and Roger Daltrey) is back in the studio recording a new CD, the band’s first since 2006, on the official Who Blog. Rosie O-Donnell writes what she calls haiku on hers, while Garrison Keillor waxes poetic about subjects hither and non. You can stream his latest album from the weblog of Bob Mould .

You can find these blogs and other celebrity scribbling in the NewsGator taxonomy by clicking Add Feeds, then Find Feeds and the folder “Celebrity Bloggers” in the list. When you see one you like, click subscribe to add it to your reader.

Use Bookmarklets to Subscribe to Feeds

One of the places we find good ideas for improving NewsGator’s suite of products is our users. Here is a good one for those who don’t want to open up NetNewsWire or FeedDemon just to add a new feed.

David Chartier, who writes for Ars Technica, found that he could go to the Extras tab in NewsGator Online and use the bookmarklet option that allows him to subscribe to the feed in NewsGator Online. With NewsGator's synching option, that subscription then shows up the next time he opens NetNewsWire. Thanks, David.