I've seen these terms thrown around ever since I started blogging. I know that Movable Type supports RSS feeds natively. The trade rags say these technologies are hot. So?...
Well, I finally have found an application that demonstrates the coolness of this stuff in a way that is meaningful to me.
There are a series of blogs that I like to keep up with. Trouble is, it is a little bit of a pain having to navigate to each one individually. Some of them have a place where you can enter your e-mail address so they can notify you each time a new entry is posted, but, the author has to remember to trigger the notification.
Well, I stumbled on to NewsGator while reading an article in Computer World.
NewsGator is a "news aggregator" that runs in Microsoft Outlook. It allows you to subscribe to various syndicated news feeds (such as weblogs, news sites, etc.) and have news from these sites be delivered right into your Outlook folders. There are thousands of sites which syndicate their content in RSS format, and many more being added every day. You can even read NNTP newsgroups with NewsGator.Rather than visiting all of your favorite sites a few times a day, you can bring the web to you with NewsGator. You'll never again be the last to know!
With NewsGator, all of the updates appear in a folder right in MS Outlook! Now I can check for updates to my favorite sites at the same time I check for new e-mail messages.
Way cool! The site offers a downloadable 14 day free trial, and the software is only $29 to keep.
NewsGator also offers plug-in to allow you to post to your blog directly from NewGator, including a third party plug-in from Matt Berther called MovablePoster while allows posting to Movable Type. To hopefully save you a little bit of hassle, there is a bug in the installation program for MovablePoster that prevents it from being seen in NewsGator. The install will enable the stand-alone version of MovablePoster, but not the plug-in. To fix this situation, follow these instructions from the MovablePoster support forum:
It appears that NewsGator doesn't automatically created the plugins folder, even though it does add the key to the registry.MovablePoster needs to create the plugins directory, if it isn't there.
The temporary fix is to do it yourself. Create a Plugins directory under Program Files/NewsGator, and copy the three files out of MattBerther.com/MovablePoster/plugin into the NewsGator/Plugins directory.
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Posted by David at March 13, 2004 12:18 PM | Categorized under: Reference