Even though I’m a happy NewsGator customer, I decided to try out the new beta version of RSS Bandit. Wow, I really like the newspaper view. I wish I had this in Outlook.

I recently hopped on the GTD bandwagon and among other changes I deleted all my mail rules and started over. Previously, I was routing my email to different folders based on if I was on the To: line, the CC: line, it came to one of the team aliases or none of the above. I discovered that I pretty much only keep good track of my main inbox with the stuff that came directly to me. Other stuff just languished, unprocessed. Now, I route mail to folders based on the mailing list it comes from. Some mailing lists have lower priority than others. This newspaper view would be perfect for quickly scanning these low priority mail folders, esp. with the feature to mark all as read when leaving the folder.

Norman blogs about how he chose what blog service to use. His criteria were: 1) ease of use and 2) look of the final product. (Of course, look of the final product was important to Norman – he’s in marketing!) As a developer and architect, I originally cared most about “rolling my own”, though I switched over to dasBlog about a year ago. (I just don’t have the time to roll-my-own as often as I used to.) However, given that I had invested significant effort into the look of my final product, that factor was important to me as well, which is one of the reasons I chose dasBlog over .TEXT.

Of course, what’s funny about investing so much time thinking about the blog template is that I think most people read the site via RSS, not HTML. Chris Anderson of “The Long Tail” wrote about this a while back. Maybe I should invest a little effort into the new dasBlog Community Edition effort – I’d like to see the number of times the RSS feed is downloaded vs. the number of times the home page is downloaded.

Norman further goes on to discuss the fact that his blog is hosted on Blogger, which of course is now owned by Google. I like his point that “Interoperability and mixed environments is the way the world works. If it is good enough for my customers, it is good enough for me.”

After reading this entry by Chris “Long Tail” Anderson (as opposed to Chris “Avalon Architect” Anderson) I went back to play with my MSN Space. In addition to the blog, my MSN space supports photo albums and lists – both of which show up in the RSS feed. Cool, so MSN Spaces solves the issue that Chris is having with Movable Type (though MT expects to support this soon). Since I’m using NewsGator Outlook, each change to the list shows up as a new entry, but I imagine other news readers simply update the content and mark the post as unread.

However, there is one slight issue with the MSN Spaces RSS feed – at least for photo albums. The RSS item’s description is a snippet of HTML showing the thumbnails of the photos – or at least, the thumbnails of the first ten photos. I understand not pushing every thumbnail down to the client automatically, but once you get past ten photos in a photo album, the RSS decription doesn’t change when you add more pictures and the people syndicating your site don’t have any way to know you’ve updated the album. There needs to be some other snippet of HTML, maybe showing the time and date of the last update, that will change so that the news readers can tell the album has been updated.

Otherwise, my only real quibble with MSN Spaces is the unfriendly URLs. The url for my Patrick photo album is huge and ugly. Ouch! Why can’t it be something like http://spaces.msn.com/members/devhawk/photos/patrick\_pics?

Update: I deleted the actual URL to the Patrick Photo Album as it is huge and was causing scrolling issues with my blog template. Feel free to click on the photo album link and then you can observe the url from the comfort of your own browser address bar.

Speaking of DSL Tools, Software Factories co-author Jack Greenfield just started blogging. He has jumped into the running debate between IBM’s Grady Booch and a variety of MS folks including Steve, Alan and myself. He does a good job summarizing the argument including pointing out where he and Booch agree:

In particular, we share the conviction that packaging knowledge for reuse in patterns, languages, frameworks, tools and other form factors is “the right next stage in cutting the Gordian knot of software”.

Jack rightly points out that while we all agree on these mechanisms for packaging knowledge that the devil is in the details. I look forward to seeing more on these details from Jack in the future.

My pal Chris started a blog over the weekend - I’ve been bugging him to do so for quite a while. I’ve know Chris for several years – he used to be an officer in a company that I helped migrate over to .NET. The company got sold, but Chris hasn’t blogged what he does now so I’m not going to spoil the surprise (hint – he did blog about automatic external defibrillators).

So far, Chris is doing a lot of ranting – his favorite pub in Edmonton (which I’ve been to), Amazon Theater, and reselling livestrong bracelets. Personally, I think it’s funny that Chris can build a wearyellow livestrong flair for his blog template, but he hasn’t built an XML flair that points to his syndication feed.

Chop busting aside, I’m glad to see Chris posting. When I first met Chris, I was transitioning from consultant to technical sales, and I’ve learned a bunch from Chris about how business works that has come in very handy now that I work with architects. Chris, can’t wait to see more from you. But when are you coming to Seattle for a visit?