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Welcome to the Oddblog, where we prattle on incessantly about bug fixes, feature additions and all things Oddpost. Please note that if there are no announcements on a given day, it does in fact mean we were out blowing your subscriber dollars on handcrafted doilies and pink champagne.
Just over a year ago today, we here at Oddpost demonstrated miraculous foresight by integrating news aggregation into email. Almost overnight, the worldwide intelligence quotient tripled as millions began absorbing mountains of information in a fraction of the expected time, sharing that information with their colleagues using a single click of the Forward button, and bracing themselves for the imminent cancellation of Friends. A well-earned huzzah echoed throughout the corners of the globe, and yet even before it threatened to wane, we began asking ourselves: is it possible that this could get, dare we say it, better?
Yes, it soon became apparent that while email and news aggregation are, in many ways, like cookies and milk, rainbows and leprechauns, and being and existential horror, their ideal user interfaces are more like, you know, two things that are complementary yet unique enough to justify treating them differently. For example, whereas an unread count next to a mail folder is an excellent way to give you an at-a-glance sense of pending load (good lord, I have 34 unread messages, I better stop reading Jack Harvey!), that same mechanism next to a news folder induces completely unnecessary stress (good lord, the BBC posted another 57 stories since lunch...wait a sec, I don't care!). Similarly, clicking on a feed and seeing dozens of bold headlines screaming for your attention made aggregation start to feel less like a convenience and more like a burden.
So we've introduced a better way. Next to each feed you'll now see an icon that calmly informs you when that feed contains new posts. Click the feed at your leisure and not a moment before. When you do, you'll notice a view that accounts for the fact that first and foremost aggregation is about reading. Simple controls allow you to set the font, font size and column width just how you like them. And rather than facing a stack of bold headlines that you have to click through to find the posts that interest you, you're presented with each post's full, easy to scan text. For blogs, it's a lot like reading them on their native web site, only 1) you get the convenience of new content notification, 2) you control the format and 3) posts are atomic, so you can easily archive them or forward them to friends. For news and other feeds where the post is merely a summary and link to a larger story, you can turn on the preview pane to see the full, linked to story (and maximize it using F11 of course). In fact, when you subscribe to a feed, we now automatically detect which view is most appropriate based on the feed's content. By default, blog-like feeds get no preview pane and a narrower column width more suited to reading large blocks of text, while news-like feeds show the preview pane and get a wider column width more suited to quickly scanning headlines.
Mercy, there's more. If aggregation is first and foremost about reading, then second and, uh, secondmost it's about sharing. So sure, you can forward a post as an email, but what about when you want to share something with absolutely everybody (or at least the absolutely everybody that reads your blog)? Wouldn't it be cool if you could post any message or news item to your blog without ever leaving your mail program? Wouldn't it be even cooler if you could do so using drag and drop? We are relieved you agree, because that's exactly what we've implemented in Oddpost. Head over to File > News and Blogs > Add External Weblog to add your TypePad, Blogger, Radio or other weblog to Oddpost's folders pane. Then, when you read an email or news post that you want to share with the world, just drag and drop it onto your blog. Forget about copying the text you want to post, pasting it into Word to spell check it, cutting it back out, logging into your weblog service and pasting again. In Oddpost you spot the story or email you want to share, drag and drop it on your blog (or choose Post to Weblog from the right-click menu), add your own comments, spell check it, give it a title, even assign it to a category, then click the publish button. And if you start composing a post and want to finish it later you can save it as a draft, just like an email! And I'm spent. In conclusion, there will be no conclusion, only happy subscribers sending love letters to Debbie.
7:22:56 PM 
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While we're on the topic of potpourri, let's take a quick look into the cornucopia of little things that aren't bug fixes but aren't really features either: If you add "/classic" to the URL you normally use to log into Oddpost, you may notice a subtle but important shift in the interface. The feed URL is now displayed in the Subscription Properties dialog. You can toggle a folder open or closed by hitting the Enter key. We now show even more image types right inline. The calendar no longer slows to a crawl when it contains recurrent events. The view filter now clears when you change folders, as it should have all along. We now support the content:encoded and xhtml:body techniques for including post descriptions, meaning more feeds will display the full text of articles. We bought more fileservers, wrote code so that folks could live on any of them, and actually spread folks across them to improve performance.
7:15:02 PM
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Though Robbie feels it is nothing to stand on a pile of barnyard waste and crow about, we nevertheless present the following bug fix potpourri to gently freshen your Oddpost experience: We fixed the problem where using a new mail notification sound could occasionally hang IE6. We fixed some occurrences of Ctrl-P opening double Print dialogs and Ctrl-O causing double open actions. We now provide better error messages when mail cannot be sent due to a bad From or To address, a poorly formatted address, or a forbidden attachment type. We improved our error recovery from connection failures during Send and Save operations. We fixed a problem with fetching mail from Yahoo! accounts that use exotic passwords. And of course we fixed the problem where sometimes feed subscriptions would be permanently disabled, displaying a bogus error message that "Oddpost could not fetch or parse this feed for an extended period of time."
7:14:03 PM
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© Copyright 2004 Oddpost, Inc.
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