Nick Bradbury announced today that shared news aggregator site ReadBurner has added Newsgator (ie FeedDemon) shared items feeds to their site.  This means that us FeedDemon users can join all the cool Google Reader kids over there.

Along with including NewsGator feeds, they’ve added NewsGator as a tab up the top of their site along with Google Reader & Netvibes so you can read your feeds without leaving the ReadBurner site.  While that’s not a huge feature to me (FeedDemon FTW!) I’m sure it would be handy if you used the Newsgator web interface.

Here’s the instructions from Nick on how you add you Newsgator clipping feed:

Here’s how it’s done:

1. If you haven’t done so already, share one of your clippings folders as an RSS feed (this screencast explains how this is done in FeedDemon).
2. Copy the URL of the shared clippings feed to the clipboard (in FeedDemon, you can do this by clicking the “Copy” link from the clippings properties).
3. Browse to http://www.readburner.com/
4. Go to the "Add Feed" option on the right hand side of the ReadBurner menu bar, then select “NewsGator Clippings” and enter the URL of your clipping feed.

Also, as Nick mentioned, FeedDemon allows you to share web pages as well as feed items.  Just drag the url into your clippings folder & it will get added (Just the title, the content of the page won’t be added).

This is great, and a great boost for Newsgator & FeedDemon as they get more visibility in the RSS reader market place.  Remember kids, FeedDemon, along with the syncing ability of Newsgator is free! You need to download it now.

Update: Here’s my clippings folder on ReadBurner.  It’s just showing up as ‘Link Blog’ despite me putting in my alias.  Oh well, I’d prefer to have my name there, but at least it’s working! Drew from ReadBurner responded to my issue & has already fixed it, thanks Drew! (see comments below)

Amit Agarwal from Digital Inspiration has posted that FeedDemon, the best RSS reader ever, has been updated to version 2.7.  It’s kind of unexpected as the last version that was announced by Nick Bradbury was the 2.6.1 RC2.   Nick has added Amit’s post to his shared clippings folder, but other than that there’s been no ‘official’ announcement.  FileForum seems to have gotten the update first, and then the Newsgator download page was hastily updated to the 2.7 version (the page still mentions the 2.6 version, but the download file is for 2.7).

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While I’m on the topic of FeedDemon, Nick Bradbury posted a couple of days ago about how to localise the language of FeedDemon.  It’s fully customisable using the language xml files in the [FeedDemon Install Folder]/Data/lang/ folder.  So in view of that I put together a modification of the default American English language file that changes the spelling of words like ‘colour’ and ’synchronised’ from the American to the Australian (or British) spelling.

If you want to use it grab it from here.  If you’re viewing that page in FeedDemon it will install it automatically.  If not, just copy the file to the folder above & restart FeedDemon.

One of the pitfalls of being an information junkie, and especially a habitual RSS subscriber is the inevitable firehose effect, and the fact that I just don’t have enough time when I start in the morning to read through everything that’s in my unread items in FeedDemon, let alone reddit, and any number of other items I find during the day.  FeedDemon has a very nice ‘clippings’ tool that can store items for looking at later, but it’s only good for inside FeedDemon.  I can click and drag an item from FireFox into FeedDemon’s clip folder, but it’s a pain.

Marco Arment of Tumblr has built a site called Instapaper.  It has to be the simplest bookmarking site I’ve ever seen.  No tags, no design fluff, you don’t even have to enter a password to register if you don’t want to.

For an explanation of what it is, this is what Marco said:

Here’s the basic premise:

• You come across substantial news or blog articles that you want to read, but don’t have time at the moment.
• You need something to read while sitting on a bus, waiting in a line, or bored in front of a computer.

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NewsGator has announced that they are offering their client software products as free software.  This includes FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Inbox, and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile.  Also, the new version of FeedDemon (2.6) has been released.

This is quite a big deal.  FeedDemon is an awesome piece of software, and the synchronisation tool (also free) makes it invaluable for people who use it at home and at work.  Nick Bradbury has assured everyone that this doesn’t mean that development is going to stall now:

"Is this some sneaky ploy to stop development of FeedDemon and your other consumer products?"

Good lord, no.  I realize that some companies have made their software free as a first step towards dumping it entirely, but that’s not the case here.  If it was, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post - I’d be bitching at the top of my lungs in some bar somewhere.

This is a major investment on our part.  If anything, the pace of development will only get faster.  NewsGator CTO Greg Reinacker goes into this further, but basically, there are two reasons we’re doing this crazy thing.

You need to download FeedDemon now!  I don’t care what other RSS reader you use, this one is better. The only reason I could conceive before now not to use it was the cost, but seeing as that’s now no longer an issue, everyone needs to use FeedDemon.  There are so many features, I’ve mentioned plenty before (see here).

Download, it’s what all the cool kids are doing!

Get it while it’s hot.  List of changes on that page.

I’ll back the first one straight out of the box, updating and synchronising is way faster, almost instantaneous in some cases. Seems to start up faster too.  Adding the Find Feeds option into the file menu is a nice touch for those who didn’t do it on install but now want to see what else is out there.

It just one more thing I love about FeedDemon; almost every minor release or release candidate has a new feature in it that users have requested, unlike most software where it’s just ‘invisible bug fix x fixed‘.