Yes: they bit me. Now I found a undocumented feature about dasBlog: just add <DaysCommentsAllowed>60</DaysCommentsAllowed> to your site.config and it will only allow to post comments on entries not older than 60 days. Then I also disabled trackback and pingback, cleaned all my tracking entries and spam comments...

Low cost marketing: So here is the first step -- I blog about:

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Now awaiting to get it for test...

Just got it work, yesss! You can download it here. Just expand the zip to your RSS Bandit installation sub-folder named plugins. Within the config file you can change the default note page used and some templates to format the posted item link and content.
Inspired by a comment by MrPuck at Dare Obasanjo's post I got the idea. It should work with OneNote 2003 SP1. Thanks to Donovan and Andrew.

I wished I would have earlier experienced that a conference like Les Blogs takes place. So for now I only can read the short review Les Blogs: "Profi-Sex ist auch nicht besser als Amateur-Sex" [german, heise.de] or Vive le Blogs [wired news] (covered to late).

France is for now the number two in the blog world (overall count of web logs, "...half of all schoolchildren are bloggers..."): so I'm happy we are able to support also a french transation of my favorite RSS Reader:

"The French have a long tradition of speaking loudly," said Loïc Le Meur, a Frenchman and Six Apart's European vice president. "We are the people who made the French Revolution, (the national uprising of) May '68 -- and just look at all our strikes! We always want to debate. Perhaps blogs are the ultimate tool for us to express ourselves."

There are some postings here and there that indicates: the advertising companies (e.g. feedburner.com) now have also an eye to RSS feeds. There are some serious people who like to measure the requests of each single feed post and/or produce some income to lower their hosting costs. Others don't like to see such ads in their subscriptions. So I experimented today a bit to provide a channel processing infrastructure enabling assemblies to plug into the processing chain of RSS Bandit. Now it works all together and my first plug-in is...

You are right: an ads blocker:

RSS Bandit Ads-Blocking via NewsChannelServices" height=522 alt="RSS Bandit Ads-Blocking via NewsChannelServices" src="http://www.rendelmann.info/blog/content/binary/Ads-Blocking%20via%20NewsChannelServices.gif" width=664 border=0>

It is still a simple example but easy to extend with a blacklist loaded from a file or other things. The major improvement is the new channel plug-in infrastructure. Some things I have to discuss with Dare Obasanjo and Phil but if we get an agreement, it will maybe included in the next release of RSS Bandit (Wolverine). So what can you do with it? Examples:

• Saves feed content in a MySQL database as it arrives
• Monitors one or more URL's and notifies you when the web page(s) have changed
• Content manipulation like the ads blocker above
• ...

Stay tuned!

Yes: now it is back - my old layout from the brinkster days is transformed to a dasBlog theme named 'segertGreen' (a modified web design based on a free version published by segert.net). It rumors (by mail) there may be a dasBlog theme contest the next time, so here are my two cent.

As Dare Obasanjo states: information overload is a real problem for aggregator users. Intelliseek's BlogPulse Web crawler provides a intelligent way to scan the blogsphere for relevant things, e.g. a feed:bursty phrases digest.

Now I found a working configuration for w.bloggar posting to dasBlog 1.5.xxx inclusive title and category (you have to correct Host and Page path):

And these are the (more important) custom settings:

The category dropdown also may have Categories metaWeblog API - single selected, take what you want (how do I select multiple categories in w.bloggar?).
BTW: what are Templates for (in relation to dasBlog)?

Just testing the mail a blog post feature of dasBlog, if it works, this entry should show up in a few minutes.

Found via Jon Udell: an email-to-RSS gateway called MailBucket. Very useful to reduce the amount of filter rules needed in Outlook to sort them out... The impermanent feeds aren't really a problem. An Rss Reader seems to be more and more important like a Web Browser, or e-Mail Client. BTW: where is the NNTP-toRSS-gateway?

Sensitive Light is an absolutely stunning photoblog. Like the very best amateur photography always does, it makes you want to grab a camera and rush out to capture all the miraculous wonder of the world, even though you're sure you can't come anywhere near his brilliant work. [phil ringnalda dot com]

Found via Daypop Top 40: the Gender Genie. After applying some tests with blogs I read it seems to be use the Random() function. What a joke

Clemens Vasters: I think they exist. [Aggregation by category]

Agree, here is a suggestion for another category domain -- the common NNTP groups should also work well: The item-level then looks like this:

 dotnet.framework.interop
 alt.religions

But it is still only a suggestion to an aggregator, how to group items. Don has some related nice ideas about Filters in News Aggregators.

A new one on the horizon: dasBlog. It's free, it's .NET based and seems to be the first official code branch of BlogX, that is still the most active GDN workspace with currently 297 members, followed by RSS Bandit (Aggregator), with 180 members.

ScottW points here to an article of Jeff Julian. But this is only the first step. One step further you ends up at bloglines.

Update: Thanks Jeff - I refreshed the link targets!

Very busy this week (and also next weekend) continued to wednesday next week. My reminder:

• Amazon feeds: http://www.lockergnome.com/amazon/,
• BBC News feeds: http://backend.userland.com/2003/06/24#a302,
• Rotor presentation downloads: http://research.microsoft.com/programs/europe/rotor/workshop.aspx#Download%20Presentation.

Via Don Park:

"... I propose that, while people appear intelligent and have complex behaviors individually, people get dumber and their behavior simpler as group gets larger. If this is true, then given a large enough group of people, group behavior will be indistinguishable from the behavior of a buffalo herd. ...
...With buffalos, only female buffalos can reproduce and once a year. With bloggers, every blogger can reproduce year round without any limits to the number of offsprings. We are worse than rats or rabbits. We are worse than SARS. We are the Borgs."

The buffalo analogy does not fit very well -- who would like to be compared already gladly with a buffalo? There are mainstream topics discussed in the blogspace that are comparable to the phenomena of the mass hysteria (which fits to the buffalo herd). This forms the larger groups or communities of blogs in the space often reflected by their blogrolls. But the discussions are often controvers and not all of them are of the same opinion about the direction to go. So also the Borg analogy does not fit: the only community is blogging where assimilation can take place. BTW the term is already in use and a known as B0rg

As I have written below, the story goes on...

I think if Luke would read my entry made on March 23, 2003 he would't write stolen. Dare Obasanjo impl. the backend support on RssComponents, my part was the GUI. As I can remember SharpReader comes out first April 6, 2003. If Luke did read my entry, I could ask him the same question. As a old newsgroup reader I would say this "threaded view feature" is a natural requirement to visualize the blog's interconnections. As it is common to answer/reply another blog's entry on the own blog (as I do here), a normal aggregator cannot provide the interconnection feeling. However, as long as 25hoursaday.com is down, you may get a screenshot here.

Would be nice BlogWorks will be aware of spam on comments. Sam Ruby points to an interesting paper (and project) about semantic blogging: blogtalk.pdf Will Feedster be rolled over by commercial competition?

coral aka Crystal Flame writes about opinionated linking. That sounds very interesting and perhaps get supported by feedster.
But how about a special opinion namespace on xhtml:

<a xmlns:my="http://semantic.web/link/opinions" class="positive" my:opinion="positive">positive link target</a>

...and the spider/aggregators life will be much easier.

Sean McGrath:

This is so cool. Sit back and watch the world blog its way around the clock. Now you know you simply must get those geotags and that RSS autodiscovery machinery into your blog.

Adopted now.
Sam Gentile:

Rico is one of the smartest guys on the CLR team and he is super, super passionate about performance.  He is looking at everyway possible to make managed code run faster...   He just posted a great whitepaper on how the GC works and how to get the best perf possible out of your managed code... worth a read!

Where is the blog of this smart guy named Rico?
Sellsbrothers:

NAnt 0.8.2 was recently released. Note that this release has support for both the Microsoft.NET framework v1.1 and Mono.

Now it's time to dive in and setup our company build server. The NAnt user mailing list I'm subscribed to serves around ten mails a day, so all probems should be known by the dev team and probably fixed RSS on each sourceforge project rocks!

Adrian: had a problem to post this with w.bloggar 3.1: got error 1072896760 - "error parsing the xml passed to the server: rpcserver(1)". Don't know if it is related to Blogworks XML or the new w.bloggar release installed today.

Read Chris Heathcote's [anti-mega: RSS. Sucks.]. Agree to some points, no to others. At first: there is no software out in the world that really ALL users agree to and happy to use it. The better ones have a better implementation of the compromises and the problem is more general than related to RSS Aggregators only. Depends on what you expect to be solved by the SW: all what you want within one program, than it should be implemented by the OS, or - some tools that solve special problems or address different tasks to be done. The problem of each tool: it should integrate with all the others to get the result you want. A solution that just works out of the box is there for more than 20 years: UNIX and all the command line tools. They all work together by pipes and programmed by the shell. But: who really loves the command line? Other solutions still exists for GUI OS's: OpenStep (and may be MacOS X, but no hands on) and the Services concept: each program can offer services (specific tasks to be done), so a digital translator listen for marked words within a textbox and offer a translation service. The services interfaces are well documented and served by the underlaying framework, so it was easy to implement such integration. I think such more general (and easy to applied) approaches should be there on Windows and .NET than each tool implement a special plug-in interface of one other tool.

Far eastern: just tried [awasu] for about 5 minutes, the approach they use there is bit different than Bandit: the feed items are just bookmarks to the original blog page, categories not working but one the way. One feature that is jet also on my list: the summery view, and another one new to me: navigate to a feed item (configured for that feature) by the tray icon context menu. That's really nice. Think about to implement a variant with display new unread items. They have a nice website I recommend to view.

Simon, Dare Obasanjo, Sam and Chris had a discussion about Extensibility. In general it is good idea to have them. On a complete new design it is always nice to have a look to current existing solutions: that of the VS7 IDE itself (was not a big change from VS6) or more interesting that of SharpDevelop (uses the framework to program the framework). They use a combination of xml/native API (interfaces) that works very well: xml describes the plug-in/add-in while the add-in itself use native API to communicate. To get the ideas take a hour to examine the code. A nice plug-in for an RSS reader would be an editor/blog post program. Also: for an blog maintenance program like w.bloggar or BlogX it would be nice to have a reader plug-in. So what is the "master" application to workaround the hen egg problem?

Syndirella dev. seems to be over. I had the same feeling as SharpReader and Harvester appeared on the horizon. But hey: giving up because coding goes out of fun and will be real hard work? Should not be a problem if the product succeeds. Just make the features a bit better and the product more stable and all folks will love you

Sam is really a source of ideas related to RSS. Many of my own thoughts regain on his blog, so I do not have to scribble down all the stuff again just read the blog again. Hints about the BCL type names are important to me if I have to design own components:

[CLSCompliantAttribute(true)]
public class XXY ...

The CLSCompliant should be one of my defaults. Anyone knows about a c# compiler switch to check this without the attribute?

Hey, nice: BlogX moves to GotDotNet. Welcome!

Found on Tim Ewald's Spoutlet: MSDN finally has official RSS feeds! And: "... We have big plans for using RSS going forward!". Sounds like a Bandit Clone will be a official Office product soon... (May be not a joke)

SourceForge.net makes it easier to stay up-to-date. Hey, they are riding on the wave while GotDotNet is swimming :-( A slashcode article points me to extend my page templates by a line of code to support weblog aggregation tools. Last but not least: that's my first post using w.bloggar.

Looking around the last week at some available feed reader clients, I have found my personal favorite: FeedReader. Really handy tool. At first my favorite was NewsGator as I have outlook always open/running and the integration of the tool works well. But you have to invest some money (avowed: only a few $) and you cannot structure the feeds, that's important if you don't read only a handful feeds. Also looked over the NewsMonster, but it's really like it's name: a monster. At first, NS7 starts (10 sec's on my Latitude CPx H500GT ~497 Mhz), refreshing the feeds with the monster takes another 15 sec's startup of the java WebStart app and needs overall around 80 MByte RAM (20 NS7 / 60 the java app). Scott suggests another reader: NewzCrawler. Just like FeedReader, but a bit of overkill for my needs and I have to spent some $ again. Very interesting things happen on .NET: RSS Bandit, or some other tools addressing the handling of own blogs, like that Outblog (Exchange involved), or BlogX. Awaiting the moment to switch my own blog (together with the provider) to a .NET app...

"Don opens the kimono and plays Morpheus for Clemens' Neo". Would be good other (non-MS) guys are also be more involved than got a screen shot about a product that changes the name every month to be more excited... Blogx IS very interesting, looked over the sources and thinking about an outlook integration to have more powerfull frontend for writing posts. May be I can glue together the amazing tool or parts of from Ingo and blogx.

Hello! This does not mean (alas), that this blog runs with .NET; it is about .NET. Especially my own activities like learning the framework, programming it, visiting and/or talking on conferences about .NET. There will be no relation to my work as an employee (that's very similar, but has different tasks). And: this talking goes english, where my own site is a german one. Have fun..