Weblog Tools Collection

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Vladimir Prelovac has come up with yet another cool plugin, this time called Live Blogroll. Live Blogroll replaces the default blogroll in that when a user hovers their mouse over a link, the rss feed from that site is aggregated in an Ajax created box showcasing the most recent (configured number) of posts. The Live Blogroll uses internal caching for feed discovery and WordPress caching for RSS feeds to keep everything from slowing down to a crawl.

Vladimir is on a roll in terms of creating cool WordPress plugins. This one is yet another shining example.

Geoffrey Sneddon, one of the developers behind the popular syndication plugin called SimplePie has announced that he will be discontinuing his role as an active developer. In a blog post published on the official SimplePie dev blog , Geoffrey explains why it’s time for him to move on. Schoolwork, lack of available time for the project and what free time he has is spent on the HTML 5 specification and Tolerant HTTP Parsing specification. However, a couple of the modules that deal with the SimplePie API will be maintained.

Despite Geoffrey leaving his development duties, he has left himself open to take more of a consulting role with the 1.x SP code base.

The good news? Ryan, the other developer for SimplePie has responded by stating:

1) SimplePie is NOT stopping development. I have big plans for where I want to take SimplePie, and those can’t happen if SimplePie is dead. In posts over the past few months, I’ve talked about where I want SimplePie to go, and that is still the plan, although it may take a little longer.

2) Over the past 3.5 years, SimplePie and it’s community have grown larger than Geoffrey and I could properly handle. It’s certainly larger than I alone can handle. Geoffrey and I will be looking for people in the SimplePie community to get involved with development, support, and other various aspects of the project.

3) I’m expecting to release SimplePie 1.1 in a matter of days. We also have a MySQL-capable branch that was likely to be 1.2, and will now definitely be 1.2. SimplePie 1.5/2.0 are no longer on any kind of timeline, as we need to get new people involved and up to speed first before we really plan those releases out.

As soon Geoffrey and I have time to work out more of the details, we’ll be sure to let you know.

I currently use the SimplePie Plugin for WordPress which provides WordPress bloggers the ability to syndicate RSS and Atom feeds to your blog. It works wonderfully well and is the plugin that powers my link blog. I really hope development continues for SimplePie as it would be a real downer if the project were to disappear.

Do you use SimplePie? If so, be sure to let me know your thoughts on the plugin.

Opinion: Flock Never Stood A Chance I simply do not see the need for Flock in my set of web tools, but then again I have never used tools developed by others to perform my itch/scratch functions (translated: written my own or emulated an existing one when I needed them). I believe that Flock is a good idea but the need is too fragmented. The number of people what would want the gamut of features that Flock offers from within their browser is not enough to employ 13 people (I think) on a full time basis.

That being said, I am sure that Flock and its team has a lot of talent and good ideas going for them. I would just need to be really razzled and dazzled for me to switch to another browser besides the Fox.