I don't know how many have found these tools for doing their news (I'm guessing not many because I couldn't find many posts on it), however these make my life so much easier - I thought I'd share.

For PULLING news, I use Sharpreader - SharpReader is an RSS/Atom Aggregator for Windows, created by Luke Hutteman. It's free / donation ware and it doesn't come bloated with all the junk you'll find in other Aggregators.

For POSTING news - I use the w.bloggar - w.bloggar is an application that acts as an interface between the user and one or more blog(s)/new(s); in other words, it is a Post and Template editor, with several features and resources that the browser based blog editors do not offer.

The sharpreader also has a w.bloggar plug-in, which I find helpful.

Nice tools you have there. Thanks for sharing again.

-SMD

I'll add, there's a bug in News 1.42 that might cause you a headache. It's not present in News 1.1 tho.

If you or any of your users submit a news article with w.bloggar and don't choose a topic - when they submit it, News 1.42 automatically assigns it topicid '1'. Not a problem - UNLESS YOU DON'T HAVE A TOPICID 1.

If you don't have a TOPICID 1, the news wont show and you cant edit it. However the waiting contents - submitted news block will show you news waiting. When this happens, you have to go into the DB and Manually assign a valid topicid number to the submission - then it will show.

Oh i see.. i am trying to configure it... but i got error message:

"HTTP POST failed. The error number is the returned HTTP status code".

make sense what this error all about?

-SMD

do you have xmlrpc turned off in protector?

OK. Problem solved. I put wrong path.

Thanks for your reply.

-SMD

NP.

When the xmlrpc vulnerability was out - it was nice to have protector to just click and turn it off. (GJ GIJOE!)

It sucked tho because I had to do the darn news stuff manually.

Needless to say, when i saw http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/CRDY-6E2KYB I jumped for joy!

Be sure to post back if you like it - dont like it etc!

I must say it's a great tools. I like it.

-SMD