Author: Nick Bradbury

Creator of HomeSite, TopStyle & FeedDemon for Windows, and Glassboard for Android. I'm a mobile developer at Automattic.

NewsGator is NOT “Gator”

Published on by Nick Bradbury12 Comments

Shortly after I announced that NewsGator had acquired my company, I started seeing comments from people wondering whether NewsGator was related to the “Gator” spyware company (now known as “Claria”). The answer, of course, is NO (you don’t really think I’d join a spyware company, do you?).

NewsGator founder Greg Reinacker wrote about this problem a few months ago, and wondered whether a name change was in order to prevent the unintended association. But renaming a company isn’t the simplest thing to do, and even if the rename took place, people would still refer to us as “the former NewsGator company,” defeating the purpose.

Funny thing is, I had a similar post in my own blog last month, related to some people taking offense to the “demon” part of FeedDemon’s name. Given the problems with both names, I think it’s safe to say that if we ever rename the company, we won’t choose the name “GatorDemon” :)

FeedDemon Selected for TechWeb Pipeline’s Hall of Fame

Published on by Nick Bradbury5 Comments

Just found out via a FeedDemon watch that FeedDemon is listed alongside Gmail, MovableType, Mac OS X, ICQ and Dreamweaver in TechWeb Pipeline’s Software Hall of Fame. Here’s a snippet from the article:

“When I first tried downloading RSS feeds, I found the process to be something that sounded like a good idea, but was a lot more trouble than it was worth. However, all that changed when I started using FeedDemon. This is a great tool for organizing, reading, and filing data from lots of Web sites. If you don’t use FeedDemon, you’re wasting heaps of time…On other news aggregators, things just seem to take more mouse-movements and clicks than they do with FeedDemon.”

If you have a favorite application that didn’t make the list, you can submit it to TechWeb’s Call-‘Em-Like-You-See-‘Em Contest for a chance to win some nice prizes (including a 30GB iPod photo).

Experimenting with FeedBurner

Published on by Nick Bradbury7 Comments

I’ve switched this blogs’s feed over to FeedBurner to get a better idea of what they’re all about. If you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, can you do me a favor and update it to use http://feeds.feedburner.com/NickBradbury as the URL for this feed? In FeedDemon, this is done by right-clicking on the feed in the channel bar, then selecting “Properties” and entering the new address.

Update: Several people have asked me whether FeedDemon automatically handles redirects – it does. However, my blog is hosted by TypePad, which like other hosted blog services doesn’t provide a way to redirect your feed to a new location.

Accessibility Checker Recommendations

Published on by Nick Bradbury5 Comments

Among TopStyle’s validation tools is integration with the Bobby accessibility checker, but I’ve received word from Watchfire that they’ve discontinued their free web-based Bobby service. So, I need to find a replacement, hopefully in time to include in TopStyle 3.12.

Personally, I’ve found the accessibility checks built into CSE HTML Validator Pro more than sufficient for my needs, but I realize some TopStyle customers would like integration with a free web-based checker as well so I’d like to continue to offer this feature.

Since I don’t have much experience with these tools, I’m open to recommendations from TopStyle users. Note, though, that whatever service I integrate with must be able to accept the HTML document via HTTP post (ie: application/x-www-form-urlencoded) rather than just through a public URL.

My Annual Health Crisis

Published on by Nick Bradbury23 Comments

I think I’m on a health plan which dictates that every year I must suffer from a completely unexpected medical issue. Last year it was a neck injury which resulted in surgery; this year, it’s sudden hearing loss (SHL) in my left ear.

It all started on my first flight to Denver to meet the folks at NewsGator. I had a really bad cold, and when the flight ended I noticed that my left ear felt “clogged.” I figured it was just cold-related so I ignored it at first, but I started to get concerned when it didn’t resolve itself over the next week.

My first doctor said it was caused by fluid in the ear, and prescribed something to help clear it up. But over the next few weeks it didn’t get any better.

So last week I went to a specialist, and he discovered a pretty significant hearing loss in my left ear. I have trouble hearing higher frequencies, so it’s kind of like my own personal Dolby noise reduction system. Apparently, SHL isn’t uncommon, and many times the cause is viral.

Now I’m taking two different medicines, one of which makes me feel like I’ve drank three pots of coffee (great in the morning, not so great at night). The other is a drug commonly prescribed for herpes – a fact I wish I would’ve known before I picked up the prescription! My eyes bugged out when I saw the drug’s description in the printout that accompanied it (hey, how many guys do you know who would want a herpes drug on their shelves?). Of course I immediately called my doctor, asking what the deal was and whether there was something he forgot to tell me, but he said not to worry – the drug had several other uses (whew).

Side note: don’t you hate doctors who fail to tell you the side effects of the medicine they prescribe? One of the possible side effects of the first drug is that it “may cause vomiting that looks like coffee grounds.” Wow. You’d think they’d write that in big letters on the side of the pill bottle (“Warning: this medicine may have some really disgusting side effects. Wear old clothes before taking this prescription.”)

Anyway, now it’s just a “wait and see” and hope that the medicine clears up the problem. In the meantime, it’s not too bad having poor hearing in just one ear, but it is a little awkward. For example, whenever I talked with someone at Syndicate last month I’d have to turn my right ear towards them, which felt a little odd, like I was saying, “hello, do you like my right ear? isn’t it the sexy one?” to complete strangers.

I joked with a friend of mine about how I keep falling apart despite the fact that I have a healthy lifestyle. We figure that by the time I’m 80, I’ll basically be a brain in a jar with a wireless connection to my computer (what, you think I’m ever going to stop coding?). Hmmm…actually, some days I’m already like that, so perhaps old age will suit me just fine?

Kudos to StreamSec

Published on by Nick Bradbury1 Comment

Just wanted to publicly thank Henrick Hellström of StreamSec for the excellent support he’s provided me over the past few days. I had an urgent need for digital signature verification but had no prior experience with the topic, and Henrick was extremely helpful in getting me up to speed and getting my code in working order.

Given my experience with them, I can strongly recommend StreamSec to any Delphi developer who needs an encryption toolkit.

Link Dump: May 27, 2005

Published on by Nick Bradbury

River of News

Published on by Nick Bradbury34 Comments

Screenshot of "Surfer" newspaper style

Looks like the screenshot of the “Surfer” newspaper style linked in my previous post has received some nice comments, so I thought I’d talk about how it came to be.

Dave Winer recommends that RSS aggregators adopt a River of News approach to displaying information, and I have to admit that it is a nice – and fast – way to scan items from many feeds. In fact, it’s similar to how I use FeedDemon.

As I’ve written before, by default FeedDemon acts much like an email client simply because that’s how most people are used to receiving information, but this isn’t how I use FeedDemon at all. Instead, I scan the headlines of an entire channel group of feeds. When I see something that looks interesting, I’ll read the first sentence or two of the article, and if it continues to hold my interest, I’ll either read the entire article or copy it to a news bin so I can read it later.

I think more people would use FeedDemon this way if I made it simpler to do so. Right now, those starting out with FeedDemon often don’t realize that they can radically alter the way information is displayed by choosing a different newspaper style, so I decided to create a new default newspaper style for the upcoming FeedDemon 1.51 that contains a number of different display options.

As the screenshot shows, the new “Surfer” style will enable you to change how items are sorted and grouped, and you’ll be able to toggle between full, short and no descriptions. You’ll also be able to collapse groups, and even launch links in a separate tab within FeedDemon. Plus, you can choose to copy an item to a news bin directly from the newspaper, which is great for link-mavens like myself.

My preference is to show short descriptions, which are generated by FeedDemon itself – basically, a short description is the first sentence or two of an item’s description with all HTML tags except hyperlinks removed. This makes it easy for me to get an idea of what each article is about without having to see the entire description. Although others have recommended doing away with any grouping of items, I personally like grouping items by channel (feed). I want to know the feed an item belongs to because it sets the context for how I’ll interpret it (for example, if a headline is from Boing Boing, I’ll think about it differently than if it’s from The New York Times).

Getting this all to work required enabling newspapers to “communicate” with FeedDemon itself, so I’m afraid it can’t be used with existing versions of FeedDemon. However, we’re planning to have an alpha release of FeedDemon 1.51 before too long, so I believe the tease is only a short one:)

Codin’ Fool

Published on by Nick Bradbury22 Comments

This week I’ve been in what my wife calls “mad scientist mode,” coding away into the wee hours of the morning. It’s weird how this works: some weeks I can barely write any code, whereas other weeks I can’t type fast enough (tip: loud music keeps the fingers flying).

While I love writing software, I hate how hard it is turning my brain off at the end of a solid day of coding. Somewhere deep in the cobwebbed nooks and crannies of my skull, I think there’s an army of tiny little geeks thinking about what new code I should be writing, and unlike me, these guys don’t seem to need any sleep. If I wake up in the middle of the night for any reason, these little dudes spring into life and insist that I get back to my keyboard.

Last night is a good (bad?) example – I woke up just after 1AM (ouch!), and try as I might, I couldn’t ignore the call of the keyboard. So, I’ve been awake ever since, writing code like a caffeine-addicted wiener dog. A good chunk of this time was spent ripping out TopStyle’s existing HTTP routines and replacing them with the ones I use in FeedDemon, which handle proxies, firewalls and NTLM authentication better. I also continued working on FeedDemon 1.51, completing a couple of new features (screenshot 1, screenshot 2, screenshot 3).

Of course, now I’m pooped, and even the little coders in my head are starting to get blurry-eyed. If any of my new co-workers are reading this and need to contact me today, better do it this morning – I imagine I’ll be asleep at the wheel by this afternoon :)