Content Curation Software

New Feature: Support for old-school Atom Feeds. This addition allows you to use your Google Alerts in the RSS feed section of CurationSoft

Drag & Drop Confusion: We’ve noticed that more and more support tickets are coming in with drag and drop issues. It’s not that the feature is broken but it needs to work better. As a response, we made sure the only draggable area is where the drag icon is available. Before you could drag the entire item but it wouldn’t drop. It was confusing. We believe this small change will cut down on confusion and provide you a better experience.

OPML import:  As reported earlier this week, you can now import as many RSS feeds you want with an OPML import function.

You know, this is getting really fun.  I don’t know of any curation platform that updates as much as we do.  All thanks to our tireless and massive team of programmer:  Brandon Hall.

Many of our customers have commented on the fact that Google Blog Search and Google News sources left some things to be desired.  I wholeheartedly agree.  While sometimes you can hit a home run with a query right off the bat, many times you have to keep digging to find good stuff in Google News and Blogs.

Then Brandon discovered Blekko.com‘s API.  (Even before that we were noticing some really quality results from Blekko searches.)  It made us wonder how easy it would be to incorporate Blekko results for news and blogs in CurationSoft as alternative sources.  As it turns out, not so hard.  The Blekko team was awesome to work with and very welcoming of our use of the API for CurationSoft customers.

When you next fire up CurationSoft, an update will start and you will immediately be able to search news and blogs on Blekko.  And you will see quite a difference between their results and Google’s.  It’s an awesome day for curators!

Release Notes for CurationSoft 1.0.9

• Two new sources! We found that many people were unhappy with Google Blogs & Google News so we added Blekko Blog & Blekko news search. If you’re not familiar with Blekko it’s an incredibly powerful search engine. Their results are extremely high-quality and we’re excited to have them as a content partner. When you start using Blekko for curation you’ll soon realize that it’s an excellent search engine.
•  Fixed a bug where the page navigation bar was still appearing when getting RSS feed results. That shouldn’t happen because RSS Feeds only return 10 results usually.
• Couple of small UI tweaks. Made the fact you have to double-click the RSS feed for results to return much more noticeable.

Enjoy your new curation super powers!

On a final note, if you haven’t checked out Blekko, watch this video to learn just why their results are so quality:

blekko: how to slash the web from blekko on Vimeo.

Below are the release notes from Brandon Hall, CTO of CurationSoft.  Users will find this update exciting on many fronts.  Namely, adding RSS feeds as sources to CurationSoft!

That was a request pretty much from day one from many users.  As you’ll see below, many improvements and even complete code revamps have been included in this release.

Please let us know what you think of the new version of CurationSoft below in the comments!  And, as always, we appreciate feedback and ideas which can be submitted via the support link above.

Release Notes for CurationSoft v 1.0.7

• The big news is added support for RSS Feeds. You can add your own feeds and pull data from them as needed. This feature is in BETA and will be improved greatly in upcoming versions. We’ll continue improving as we go forward in future versions.

• Improved UI for every content source. It’s now much more intuitive and easier on the eyes. We took a hard look at the layout for each source and changed all of them except YouTube. YouTube will probably get refreshed in the next update.

• Favicons for each post. We’re using a cool service to bring Favicons into every result which really jazzes up the visuals when you drop your posts. It also helps a lot with presenting information to you (in the software) and your readers (on your site).

• Google News completely revamped. To be honest, the first release of Google News wasn’t up to par with our standards and that’s been corrected. It’s a very similar setup to Google Blogs now and we think you’ll be happy with the end result.

• Twitter results completely revamped. We changed the layout, add most popular tweets (with Retweet numbers) at the top, added links for hashtags and mentions and it feels a lot more like a real Twitter search client.

• Flickr results completely revamped. It’s now a fancy tile layout and the images load once and there is no more flickering when you scroll. It’s a major upgrade to the Flickr results but there’s a lot more to do that we’ll work on in upcoming releases.

• Image caching. We’ve implemented image caching across a large portion of the app. This prevents images from constantly reloading when you change the window, scroll, etc.. It’s a major performance improvement. Expect more performance improvements in upcoming releases.

• Image Align. We added another option to the “Frequent” menu. When dragging images you can now specify if you want the image left aligned or right aligned or neither. This comes in handy when designing your posts and this way you don’t just have an image sitting in the middle of your post.

• We threw out all the previous code and implementations of Drag & Drop and completely redid it. They have been rethought from the ground up and you’ll find your experience is much cleaner, easier and less frustrating. No more erroneous HTML, link colors, etc.. To quote the late Steve Jobs, “It just works”.

• Lots of code base cleanup. You won’t see it, but we promise you’ll benefit from it through performance improvements – We will be doing a bunch more of this in upcoming versions that you’ll benefit from but may not “see”.

• We changed the autocomplete system. Not by a lot but it was setup in a way that adding an extra query wasn’t possible. You’ll find the autocomplete works better and is less frustrating. Any feedback on the autocomplete is much appreciated from users.

• Bug Fix: Found an issue where the scrollbar may disappear or extend beyond from the field of view when requesting new results.

• Bug Fix / Change: Found an issue where only one page of Twitter results could be returned. Requesting a second page threw an error. Upon thinking about it more it only makes sense to return one page. You can still set the number of results you want but the goal of our software is curation (i.e. finding the best results) and not digging through pages of largely irrelevant Twitter results. Having the top tweets returned made this a no-brainer for us.