DavidBreyer.Com

MSDN has an article on using .NET to connect to blogs, either to read or to post articles. The example shows how to create an Outlook add-in to read RSS feeds. This is for the next version of .NET, so it requires Visual Studio 2005.

My.Blogs is a collection of sample code that will show you how you can easily provide programmatic access to weblogs in the applications you build. Full source code is provided along with Windows Forms, ASP.NET 2.0 and a Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Outlook Add-In.

Read the getting started article for more ideas on using My.Blogs.

YubNub.org is more than just a strange name. It’s the first social search engine. While the default search is Google, certains commands will let you search other sites as well. You see YubNub is also the first command-line search engine. For instance typing “wp” before your search criteria will let you search Wikipedia.org. (i.e. “wp Cincinnati”)

There are an entire slew of commands. “gim” for instance will search Google images. And simply typing “ls” will give you a list of commands.

Popular commands:

gnews - Searches Google News
cnn - Searches CNN
am - Searches Amazon
weather - Gets weather for zip code
flk - Searches Flickr

Now where this site gets really cool is you can create your own commands. I did say it was social right? Just type in “create YOURCOMMANDNAME” and if it isn’t taken you will be able to create your own command with that name.

For instance I created two new searches. “cincy” will search Cincinnati.com. So if you type in “cincy reds win” it will bring up all articles from the Cincinnati Enquirer, WCPO, CiN Weekly, and The Post. The second new command is “dwb”. It will search this blog. So if you type “dwb yubnub” you will find this post.

Commands I Created:

cincy - Searches Cincinnati.com
dwb - Searches this blog
redbooks - Searches IBM redbooks

Do you YubNub?

Although I love GMail, it lacks a mobile client that I can use from my Sprint Sanyo 8100. For email on the go I would use Yahoo! Mail’s wap-based interface. It had a pretty cool feature too, you could select multiple messages and delete them. Makes it easy to clean up the gobs of spam that plagues my inbox. I say “had a pretty cool feature” because that disappeared a few weeks ago. And now they announce a new downloadable email client compatible with six Sprint phones. That promises a “PC-like interface”. For a mere $2.99 a month.

Are these two events related? I don’t know. But it does seem odd they would drop a useful feature from their mobile web client right before they announce this. I am not sure if any other features have been removed.

IBM is now offering a Sametime plug-in for Trillian on their AlphaWorks site. If you didn’t know, AlphaWorks is IBMs site for emerging and experimental technologies. You can now get the benefits of Trillian (auto-logging of conversations, stable environment, and a plethora of plug-ins), while still communicating with your sametime contacts.