Posting with Windows Live Writer

Amit Agarwal at DigitalInspiration shared a list of the Top Ten Freeware Applications For Microsoft.

I had never heard of Windows Live Writer until today, so I downloaded it and am presently typing this post in the software. Windows Live Writer (WLW) is a Windows-based, WYSIWYG blog editor that works with most blogging platforms out there. The setup for this WordPress blog was very easy, taking about 30 seconds once I remembered the login information for my account.

As you can see from the screenshot, the interface is reminiscent of Microsoft Word, but is very uncomplicated. I think I’ll try using this tool for a while and continue making comments on it. The ability to work on different blogs with the same tool is very attractive to me.

RSS Bandit and Repetitive Information Overload

For the last few months I've been reading all my RSS feeds through RSS Bandit.  Whenever I come across an interesting blog, podcast or news site I usually subscribe to the feed.  This cuts down on my surfing time at the office (a good thing), but I also see a lot of repetitive information.  Every couple weeks or so I look through my feeds and discard ones that I'm not currently reading regularly.

I currently have 29 feeds, which is probably an average amount for me.  Sites like Lifehacker, Digg, Engadget and Ars Technica are ones that I usually read thoroughly.  I'm amazed at how much information is usually repeated between all these news sources.  I find that unique news can fall through the cracks because I'm quickly scrolling through 2/3rds of the new feed updates because they're repeats.  I think sites that use tagging are useful to sort of types of news, but not as good at lumping together similar stories.  A more intelligent "auto-tagging" would be useful, but difficult to implement.  A simple, but less accurate way would be to create a tagset for a blog post or other news item based on the words in the title line.  If multiple posts share a certain percentage (let's say 80%) of the words in the title of the other posts, then they can be considered to be the same post.  I know that sounds like a good way to miss even more unique content, but I'm not sure how to implement something more sophisticated that isn't going to take forever.  Starting with a spam-filtering algorithm might help match up posts better by searching the entire blog post.

After the jump, I'll post the contents my current OPML file (copy & pasting it into a text editor would probably help the wordwrapping).