Chris Holmes Online

Something I’ve been doing a lot since I started this blog in September is reading other people’s blogs. There’ s a wealth of great information and insight out there if a person has the time to find it. But once you’ve found a blog worth reading on a frequent basis, what do you do to keep up? Bookmarks in Firefox or IE are an inadequate solution and a pain to maintain. Firefox’s Live Bookmarks are a slightly better solution, but they don’t report to you which feeds are new in any clear way. It’s up to you to remember the title of the last new post you read from someone.

What I really wanted was functionality like Outlook. One glance at Outlook and I can tell immediately if I have new mail.

Aggregators are the obvious answer to this whole problem, but if you’re like me you’ve had trouble finding the right one. I thought RSSPopper might be the solution since I use Outlook, but it was buggy and reported frequent errors reading feeds. NewsGator was another possible solution that plugged into Outlook, but it wasn’t free and I hate paying for things that I’m not certain are good products.

Then I ran discovered Bloglines.

Bloglines is exactly what I’ve been looking for. It has a really simple, clean interface that is intuitive and easy to use. It allows you to create subfolders for the blogs you read (I really like that). It’s web-based, so I can read it anywhere (an important point considering I just switched over all my private mail to GMail and dumped my local ISP). And maybe most importantly, it utilizes bold texting for feeds that have new content. This last point is the best part, because with one quick glance at Bloglines I can tell which, if any, feeds have new posts and quickly get to the content.

Finally, the icing on the cake: Bloglines provides a blogroll that you can use on your own blog even if you don’t use Bloglines as your hosting environment. That feature alone caused me to switch to Bloglines today. Before, I was having to manage my blogroll at home in Firefox, at work in Firefox, and on the web in WordPress. But not anymore. Now I can have one service manage my blogroll and it’s accessible everywhere, even on my own blog.

That’s cool.

Matias Woloski has written a new implementation of the CAB OutlookBar. He’s gone in a different direction than I did. My control was a combo of a functionality between a MenuStrip/ToolStrip and a DeckWorkspace; not the most ideal solution. Matias has created a much better control by making his Outlookbar a bona fide WorkSpace. Instead of having to manage the buttons and SmartParts as separate things, you simply create the SmartPart you want to show in the OutlookBar and his control handles the rest. No button creation necessary. It’s a completely different approach and it works much better than what I did.

The caveat, as he explains, is that you must provide an OutlookBarSmartPartInfo object when showing the SmartPart in the Workspace. This is necessary because the WorkSpace needs to know the Title of the button (at a minimum), as well as an optional image to display and an EventBroker topic to fire when the button is clicked.

The cool part about this is that Matias has implemented a StackStrip, thus providing that fancy grabber-bar functionality that allows you to show/hide the buttons, like so:

The control supports XP Themes as well (using a much better method than my cornball bitmap images) and is extremely easy to use. I’d recommend you check it out. Full source code is available. Well done Matias