Weekend Roundup

It’s all a blur. I just remember eating half a pan of brownies and bunch of lemon bars. Mother’s Day champagne brunch was good. Too good, actually.

Just discovered Glue. I love how simple it is to create and publish feeds from it, though I’m not really sure how different it is different from publishing from a blog. Maybe it’s blogging and RSS publishing simplified. And I love it. Here’s why:

1) It’s useful for non-bloggers who want to publish feeds. Blogging, I just realized, is still pretty complex despite tools like WordPress. I’ve taken it for granted that not everyone knows even basic HTML. Although html and textile are supported, there are no formatting stuff that crowds the editing window. Just a simple “headline” and “body.” And to someone who doesn’t want to bother with formatting and just want to get the information out, it’s perfect.

2) It’s simple to explain to someone else. So for me, I have team members who have information that would be best distributed through a feed. But they are not familiar with any of the publishing tools online. So this is perfect.

3) Option to e-mail. Sometimes the simplest of tools just isn’t simple enough and you’ll still get that one or two team members who will insist on using e-mail distribution lists just because that’s just they way they’ve always done it. This is perfect. Just add the e-mail address for the feed and voila! It’s there. Most other blogging tools also have this feature, but most of them are complex (subjectively complex…) that users don’t even get to this feature.

3) Admin options. I can set up other users and give them their own login. Again, this is another feature that are available from other blogging tools but they require those other users to sign up with the service. With Glue, you can set them up from your own account, give them their own login credentials and set up their privileges.

So I love Glue. But I bet I can do more things with it than I have figured out. Would definitely love to discover other features.

Here’s a wishlist, btw:

1) Publish multiple feeds from my account. I have several things I’d like to use Glue for, but I also would like to avoid needing several logins (one per feed?).  I want to publish several feeds with different audiences/subscribers.  Maybe “Project Updates feeds” will be subscribed to by “Team Members” and “Company News” will be subscribed to by “External Subscribers,” but I want to be able to do them from just one account.

Will update as I think of them.