Shortly after the release of 2009.2, and after some cooperative discussion here on ways that we might improve ePublisher moving forward, I started work on a Feed Reader for the ePublisher Start Page.  This isn’t that ground-breaking as a Feed Reader seems to be fairly commonplace on a start or splash page.  The first iteration simply listed the feed items and allowed you to view the entry in your default browser.

This was good progress, but we wanted to see if we could open the blog entries directly in ePublisher, as is the case in Visual Studio.  This turned out to be not too difficult to implement.  I think it’s cool that a fairly minor augmentation could change the way I think about ePublisher.  We’ve always had the ability to view HTML in ePublisher, though the only current place that we use this capability is in the Preview.  Opening up ePublisher to allow for browsing the web at-large caused a small cascade of ideas, which I will mention in a later post.

I’m including a couple of screen captures.  I am completely to blame for the colors, whether you like them or you don’t.  Thoughts?

Start Page with feed reader

Feed link open in ePublisher Pro