We here at Exploring Tech use Word Press as the backbone of our site, but what do you run? Vote below, and make sure you comment, especially if you picked ‘other’, or if you just want to link to your blog – do it!

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News is one of the fundamental pillars of our society. Without news, no-one would know when anything had happened, unless they had witnessed it themselves. News is important, and so is the way we are given it. Now, news is changing. It’s going online.

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  Windows Live Writer is Microsoft’s answer to blogging from your desktop, and from what I can see, it works pretty well. The interface is clean and simple, and it can detect your blog’s theme, so you can see what your post will look like on the web (although the sidebar or header isn’t shown whilst writing, you can see it in preview mode). It supports most of the popular blogging platforms including Blogger and WordPress. Windows Live writer is easy to use, clean and simple, and makes for a great blog publishing platform.

>> Windows Live Writer is available as part of the Windows Live suite of tools.

In response to our question ‘What RSS reader do you use?’ a couple of weeks ago, we received a couple of responses saying that they either don’t use RSS, or they don’t know what it is. Today, I’m going to attempt to explain what RSS is, and why it is so awesome.
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Contrary to what you might think, DestroyTwitter isn’t a plan to bring down microblogging. No, DestroyTwitter is a cross-platform Twitter client designed to run on the Adobe AIR platform. And run well it does. Setup is a breeze, simply enter your Twitter username and password and you are immediately presented with a home screen not dissimilar in function to that of the Twitter homepage at first glance, but way more powerful once you get under the hood, and it looks better, especially since DestroyTwitter can be customized with themes. From the home tab you can tweet by opening the tweet panel. This simple panel is quite useful;  it can shorten links using a variety of services and  include photos. Plus there is a handy feature that allows you to shorten those slightly-too-long tweets. But, (to sound like and infomercial), that’s not all. DestroyTwitter includes Search, people search, the ability to follow people. Pretty much evrything you can do at Twitter’s homepage, and more. You will never have to visit twitter.com again.

DestroyTwitter is freeware and runs on Adobe AIR under Windows, Mac or Linux.

EDIT: The developer of DestroyTwitter has halted development. It is still a great twitter client, and is still available for download. Unfortunately, development stopped before a couple of cool features could be added. Exploring Tech recommends TweetDeck as a replacement for those who need more functionality.

EDIT: DestroyTwitter development has started again, and version 2.0 is out. You can check out the full review from Exploring Tech about version 2 here

>> DestroyTwitter (plus official twitter)

Popular webcomic xkcd announced to day on the official ‘blag’ that there will be an xkcd book. ‘xkcd: volume 0′ will contain the best comics of the first 600, chosen by the comic’s creator, Randall Munroe as well as members of the xkcd community.  There are three official book launches in New York, San Francisco and Sillicon Valley. More details are avaliable at the xkcd ‘blag’. The book is expected to launch sometime next week and will be avaliable at the xkcd store, which also sells other various xkcd merchandise, and possibly bookstores in the future.

>> Book! (xkcd blag)
>> xkcd
>> xkcd store

Google Reader, the fantastic online rss reader, has come onto your desktop, not a desktop app yet, but it is now a google desktop gadget. Now, I don’t use Google Desktop myself, but this seems like a cool feature.
>> Google Reader on your Google Desktop, Official Google Reader Blog

We moved! Those of you that are reading this, probably didn’t even notice, we mirrored the site and transferred the domain yesterday. This is a good thing because it lets us send out email updates, something we couldn’t do before. Also, we updated wordpress, and changed the login page, so the whole site is looking a lot prettier. But it isn’t just us. The whole Mulligan Media family has moved, and we are the first site back up (not even the mail server is working at the time of posting), you can check the progress at http://mulliganmedia.net (those ISPs  who cache browsing may show the old site). And then at http://updateserver.mulliganmedia.net

Ah, finally. this is something I have wanted to do for a while. Finally a blog. Well that’s not really true, I had a blog before – but I failed to stick to posting. Shame. Anyway – new look, new platform, Hopefully this one will last. See you soon!