Tapestry now offers an OPML file containing all of their comic strip feeds. For a list of available feeds, simply click this link within FeedDemon.
Google Toolbar 2.0
The final release of Google Toolbar 2.0 is out.
Googling for Synonyms
Google now offers synonym searches.
Designing with Web Standards
Zeldman recently put the slides from his Web Design World keynote online.
Lockergnome RSS Resource Debuts
Lockergnome has introduced their RSS resource site. The site is chock full of information about RSS, and includes an overview of RSS which explains why some see RSS as a replacement for email publishing.
Separating Content from Presentation, 2nd Edition
The second edition of the excellent CSS: Separating Content from Presentation is now available (via Accessify.com).
The Myth of Perfect Web Design
D. Keith Robinson believes that there’s no such thing as “perfect” web design.
Localizing FeedDemon
One of my goals with FeedDemon was to enable it to be localized quite easily. Rather than use separate resource DLLs (or separate executables) for each language, I chose to store all displayed text in language-specific XML files. If you open FeedDemon’s “Data\Lang” folder, you’ll notice a subfolder named “English” which holds three XML files containing all of FeedDemon’s English language strings.
Localizing FeedDemon, then, becomes a matter of translating these three files into the target language and then placing them in a separate folder under Data\Lang. A few people have already translated these files into other languages. This is great to see, although I should add that any translations done right now are specific to the current FeedDemon beta are probably won’t work with the final release.
EMail Marketing Woes
Inc Magazine offers an interesting article on the problems that legitimate email marketers are experiencing due to spam filters and other email woes. Chris Pirillo is quoted as saying that “E-mail is a polluted medium. It’s dead.”
And I have to agree with him, based on my experience. I recently discontinued my own email newsletter due to all the problems with it – and it only went out a few times a year to let people know about new versions of TopStyle. This was an opt-in mailing list, but no matter what I did, somehow I still ended up on anti-spam blacklists, and getting off these lists takes time that I’d rather spend developing software.
As a result of being blacklisted without my knowledge, I constantly fielded complaints from people wondering why they never received an email notifying them about a new TopStyle release. Invariably, the problem was that an anti-spam filter incorrectly flagged my email as spam, so the customer never received it.
It flat out wasn’t worth the trouble.
That’s why I created the TopStyle Blog last year and built it into TopStyle. It provided me a way to let customers know about new versions without all the hassles of email. Which, funny enough, led me to the world of RSS, resulting in the creation of FeedDemon.
TopStyle Lite 3.10
TopStyle Lite 3.10 is now available. TopStyle Lite is a free tool which contains an extremely small subset of the features found in the Pro version of TopStyle. Most importantly, TopStyle Lite is strictly a simple CSS editor, whereas TopStyle Pro is a full-blown XHTML, HTML and CSS editor. However, if all you want is a very basic CSS editor, TopStyle Lite will serve you very well.