Post All File Types with This New Blogging Tool
Posted by Ramon G. McLeod | Thursday, February 17, 2005 12:58 PM PT
A new blogging tool from a company called
Five Across allows Web bloggers to put any file type, except executables, into their blog extremely quickly. The tool lets users drag and drop the files into the blog, even multimedia files and business documents.
Called
Bubbler, the tool also offers a group model for Wiki-like collaboration by authorized users and comes with a variety of templates to get you started. I saw Bubbler at this week's DEMO technology showcase in Scottsdale, Arizona.
I built a
test blog with Bubbler and, as advertised, it works very quickly. But it's a beta, and there are some bugs. You can indeed drop business files, like Word documents and Excel files into the blog very quickly, but the files I used (they were created in Office 97) were a complete mess when I tried to open them in the blog the way a visitor might. I also noticed that there wasn't a way to allow comments to the blog. That seems like a pretty large omission if the company wants to compete against established blogging outfits like Moveable Type.
The company will offer a 30-day free trial. After that, it's $4.95 per month.
The "mess" that happens when you click on a Word or Excel file is, ironically, a bug in Internet Explorer. It fails to recognize the links as files that need to be downloaded and opened. Try it in FireFox for better results! We're trying to figure out a way to fix this, but you can right-click to download them in the meantime.
Comments is (are?) coming very soon.
Disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Five Across, the vendor of the product :)
I'll look forward to the improvements. The speed with which this tool works is indeed impressive and should make it extremely appealling to the blogging community. Thanks for the feedback!
I checked out the test site and played around opneing everything. After opening the machine garbage file I decided to use the File menu to open the doc using "Edit with Microsoft Word" command. It worked fine that way. I realize some folks might not know how to do that but what the heck.