RSS to go mainstream

Today's news that Microsoft will build support for RSS into the next browser and its next operating system (Longhorn) is good from at least two perspectives. Making it easier to subscribe to a feed has to be the number one benefit. Today, that is still difficult and confusing for many people.

And while there are some rumblings about Microsoft being late to the RSS party, their support means that RSS has now gone definitely gone mainstream. That has to be good for everyone.

Comprehensive coverage of the news is on Alex Barnett's Blog

Testing Qumana

I'm having a look at Qumana, which is a weblog editor. I've been look for a convenient editor for use with the various weblogs which I maintain, so I was eager to try it. The installer didn't place any shortcuts on my desktop nor icons in the system tray as suggested in the documentation, but I successfully launched it from "Program files" and my initial impressions were favourable: straighforward interface, spell checking and thesaurus.

Unfortunately, it failed when trying to configure it for the Active Weblog, which uses Movable Type. Qumana found Movable Type's xml-rpc.cgi file ok, but produced this error when testing the set-up. I couldn't find any relevant support information of the Qumana site and I expect to forward this post to them for assistance.

In stead, I configured the system for use with blogger, which went smoothly and writing this quick post is my first experience with Qumana.
Later:
Unfortunately, when posting this item, a number of glitches appeared:

• The image url was mangled by Qumana and did not display until I edited the HTML.
• The title of the post did not apear on Blogger, I had to manually edit it.
  

So my initial impression is that it's not ready for prime time. That's a pity, because the world is waiting for an editor that makes posting to Weblogs as easy as writing an email and sending it.

Still later:
I received a prompt reply from Tris Hussy at Qumana asking for more information on the image display bug. I tried to replicate the image problem and found that I had mistakenly entered a backslash (rather than forward slash) in the image URL. Interestingly, this did not stop Qumana from displaying the image, but covered up the error until that post was published to Blogger. So it was caused by a combination of my poor typing and Qumana covering up that error. The other problems remain as stated above.

Powered By Qumana

Poster children for the evolution

Jon Udell and Dave Winer, always educational and entertaining. New post on Active Weblog

My Booth is bigger than your Social Software

Over at Bill's place, he's musing about the size of booths (known as stands in our local lingo, Strine) at the AIIM show in Philadelphia. Oh, Oh, you're thinking, Marius is going to have another post about trade shows too... [more at ActiveWeb]

Building it, one blog at the time

I'm in the process of gathering my consulting and other ambitions into a new company, Active Web Communications. Its focus will be to assist businesses to better take advantage of the Web, both from a Market Commmunications and from a Systems Integration perspective. We haven't yet seen the lower end of the Content Management Market mature, while RSS and Weblogs are "Crossing the Chasm". Low cost software and hosted applications are bringing new challenges for software vendors and their customers. It's an exciting time to start a new business. Anyway, I won't bore you with more of the details here now.

Sufficiant to say that the company has a Weblog of its own. Subscribe to the feed and follow along! I'll be posting my web business related pieces there from now on and focus here more on shorter pieces about technical obsessions. I also hope to give this blog a design make-over soon.

Anyway, check it out. I just wrote a piece at Active about the prospects of Sensis.