Blog Bridge HIGH LEVEL SPEC

Introduction

Blog Bridge is a new kind of general purpose RSS viewer. In this document, when I refer to a “blog” I really mean any kind of supported RSS feed. Here is a screen shot of the work in progress:

General UI features

Left Click to select and drag and drop

Any element in the user interface will respond to a mouse left click by being selected. In Channel Guides and Article Lists, multiple selection is permitted. Channels can be moved (through DnD) between Channel Guides, but Articles can not be moved.

Right Click to call up Right Click Menu

Any element in the user interface will respond to a mouse right click with a menu which will provide a set of actions, including calling up a Property dialog box.

Property Dialog on all elements

Major Components of the User Interface

Channel Guide Selector

There are the following Channel Guides: Best Bets, Favorites, Active, Suggested, Back Burner, Web Directory. Each Channel Guide has the following items of information:

·        Whether the Channels in this Guide are “Live”. This means that they are pointing to an active RSS feed, rather than simply representing the an entry in some kind of catalog.

·        The default update interval for all channels in this Guide (applies only to “Live” Guides.)

Each Channel Guide contains Channels of a certain kind. In a later section we will explain the differences and exactly how they are identified. Note that usually a Channel will occur in only one Guide, but this is not mandatory.

Channel List

An alphabetical list of Channels which are contained in the current Channel Guide. Each entry in this list displays the name of the Channel plus a variety of other useful information about it. Channels can be selected by clicking on them. Only one Channel can be selected at a time.

Article List

For the selected Channel, this list displays the Articles. Articles are equivalent to Items in RSS-Speak. However we simplify the display, and try really hard to imitate the Wall Street Journal’s “What’s News” front page column. That means that the Title and Descriptions of the RSS feed are merged, into one long paragraph. Some heuristic (TBD) handles cases when there is no Description, just a link.

Preview Panel

I am not sure that we need this feature. Because we are previewing a good piece of the Article in the Article List, it may be better to have the user double click on the Article to launch their browser of choice to actually look at the Blog or other news source in its native habitat.

Channel Guides

General

Each Channel Guide displays its channels in a channel list that is formatted more or less the same way. For each channel the following information is displayed (tbd)

·        Name of the Channel

·        How many new articles it contains

·        When it was last updated

·        Whether it can be and should be updated periodically

·        How many new articles it contains.

It is possible to drag and drop Channels from one Guide to another. Note: while the general idea of a Channel Guide is good, the specific set of Channel Guides that makes sense is still up to debate.

Best Bets

These are the Channels which the product thinks you will most likely find interesting. BB decides this based on a scoring heuristic (see below) that somehow combines how active the Channel is, how often you look at it, how often you skip by it, etc.

Favorites

These are Channels that the user has explicitly marked as a “Favorite.”

Active

These are Channels that have had a lot of activity. There are multiple customizable settings that calibrate this, but essentially activity is based on how many new Articles have been posted in the last period.

Directory of Top 100

A listing of the Top 100 blogs according to one of the web resources (today, this would be either BlogStreet or Weblogs.com.)

Recommended

The idea is that if a certain Channel (blog) is really interesting to me, I might very well be interested in blogs that are related to that one. The Recommended guide is a list derived from a combination of the user’s personal interest score (based on Heuristics – see below) and information derived from those Channels, most likely the top blogs on their blog roll.

Heuristics

One of Blog Bridge unique concepts is that it attempts to recognize how important any individual blog is to the user. This is based on monitoring the following pieces of information:

BB once a day will compute a ranking of each Channel. (That is to say, when you run BB, if it’s current rankings are older than one day, they are recomputed (in a separate thread.)

Selection and related operations

Single click Selection and Right Click Menu

In addition, the header of the Channel list serves as a right click target for the corresponding Channel Guide, and the header for the Article list serves as a right click target for the corresponding Channel.

Drag and Drop

• Channels: Can be D&D between guides. How this work is that the source of the D&D is the Channel list for a guide, and the destination is the Channel Guide button itself. The effect is that the Channel gets removed from the source guide and added to the destination guide. In addition there may be special behavior depending on the particular semantics of the two guides.

Double Click

• Articles: Double clicking on an article launches the default browser with the selected article displayed.

Property Sheets

Channel Guide Property Sheet

Channel Property Sheet

Article Property Sheet