Writing Blogs and RSS Readers

I was having a chat with a couple of people last night after the TechNet/MSDN event last night and the discussion for a short time moved to Blogging and RSS Readers etc...

Blogging Tool

To write blogs I'm trying out Microsoft Live Writer. I've heard that a lot of features have been borrowed from other writers.

Firstly Live Writer can talk to many of the popular blog servers, including Community Server which we run the NIMTUG site on. You can setup multiple WebLog accounts and publish articles separately to each of the accounts.

With my own blog, once I've setup my account Live Writer downloaded the style sheets that I use and I am give a editable view of what my post will look like.

It also allows me to open old posts from my blog and edit them.

Live Writer is starting to build a sizable community behind it creating all sort of plugins e.g. format code , flickr image link

RSS Reader

I've also installed the Microsoft Live Toolbar mainly to get the tab browser and the integration with desktop search.

One of the featured featured toolbars button is Onfolio. Onfolio is sort of a RSS reader with knobs on!!! and is now my RSS manager of choice.

You can use Onfolio as a desktop application or as a IE addin. On the left hand side you have a list of all of your feeds.

Clicking on the feed or folder give you a list of all the posts and a 'newspaper' is generated in IE which you can then read though. One of the great features is that you can add and post from any feed to a collection, so you can save those important posts off to a separate storage area. so you can find them again easily.

One of the things that I would like to see is the support for comments. Give it a try!!