Just Blog It

I have been on a quest to make posting from my newsreader du jour as frictionless as possible. My first blogging tool, Radio Userland, had that wired. Built-in aggregator, simple publishing options.

I then moved to NewsGator and Movable Type and have never been able to post successfully to my MT weblog. While I liked reading my subscriptions in Outlook, I moved on to the web-based Bloglines. I like the interface, the search tool is very handy and I have the ability to go back in time to re-read posts that I might have skipped earlier since the feeds are archived on their server. They have a clip/blog this feature, but currently you can only send items to your Bloglines blog.

I primarily use my weblog as a repository for tidbits of information I want to store and search at a later date and that is why I used reBlog for a time. But I keep going back to Bloglines. The interface and other tools I mentioned earlier provide a more efficient way for me to manage information. reBlog works well for reposting content since it has built in attribution (where the post originated) and that saves me time, but this one postive doesn’t outweigh its other interface issues.

I had the idea last week that I should create a link blog a la Robert Scoble and separate my posts from my “reposts”. I started down the path of posting entries to my BlogLines weblog and then I went looking for some php scripts I could use to parse the RSS file. I figured this was a no brainer since the Bloglines feed was RSS 2.0. Unfortunately I was unable to get this to work. The parsers kept choking on the file. I ran the RSS feed through a validator and it had issues so I fired an email off to Bloglines and have not received a response back from them yet.

While playing with Furl, I ran across JustBlogIt. It works in Firefox (my browser of choice these days) and not IE.

Here’s the key bit:
Which News Readers does JustBlogIt recognize?
Bloglines, Rojo, Radio Userland and Amphetadesk.

So I’ll give it a go and let you know how it works.

There is no excuse for news readers that can’t get this right. Too much friction and I’m gone.

Somewhat related:
With all of the recent developments in search tools announced recently you would think that baking in the ability to publish content to weblogs from your search queries would be a no brainer. I want to store that content and my storage mechanism of choice right now is my weblog, not my hard drive, not My Web on Yahoo! or the other myriad services out there.