It has been almost three years since the end of FeedDemon, but I’ve kept the Google Group for FeedDemon available for those who needed help.
Legitimate questions posted to the group have slowed to a trickle, but the regular influx of spam that I have to moderate hasn’t abated. So I’ve decided it’s time to close the group.
Rather than kill it outright, for now I’ve made it read-only just in case anyone could benefit from the information it contains.
Justin Williams writes about third-party dependencies:
As I’ve matured as a professional developer, I’ve learned to understand that a dependency and liability are many times interchangeable
He jokingly mentions how his stance will get him an invitation to the “old guy coders club,” of which I must be a long-time member (here’s proof). As current and former co-workers can attest, I’m notoriously cranky when it comes to third-party dependencies.
I wasn’t always this way, though. In my ill-spent youth I’d add third-party libraries to my projects without concern. It was a no-brainer at the time – they added so much power and snazziness with so little effort on my part.
It wasn’t until I created long-lived software like FeedDemon that I realized their downside. Components I relied upon would stop being upgraded, no longer be reliable, or simply disappear. They’d break when a new version of my OS (or even my development tool) was released. Their UI would change, affecting the UI of my software.
In some cases the pain was worth it, but more often than not it wasn’t. I spent far too much time rewriting, replacing, and rethinking third-party libraries I chose to rely on. In the long run, my software and my customers would’ve been better off if I’d been more conservative with those choices.
Don’t get me wrong – I certainly rely on third-party dependencies in the software I work on now, but I’m a lot more cautious about adding them than I used to be. I like to think of this as hard-earned wisdom rather than a sign of senility :)
Watch a screencast about FeedDemon 2.5’s shared news bins
FeedDemon’s news bins provide a handy way to save your favorite blog posts and links. When I find an interesting article that I might want to refer to again, I store it in a news bin for future reference.
In the past, news bins have been limited by the fact that they’re only available on your desktop, but FeedDemon 2.5 makes it possible to share a news bin as an RSS feed. Just drag-and-drop a link into a shared news bin, and everyone subscribed to your news bin’s RSS feed will get it.
For example, my link blog feed is actually generated from a FeedDemon 2.5 shared news bin. If I read a post that I think will interest my subscribers, I simply add it to a shared news bin. It’s like my own version of Robert Scoble’s link blog feed (except that with FeedDemon 2.5, I can create more than one link blog).
A number of FeedDemon 2.5 beta testers have created shared news bins which you can subscribe to:
If you’d like easily share your favorite links, then give FeedDemon 2.5 a try.
Andrew Herron