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By Wayne Cunningham
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6/23/04
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RSS feeds bring automatically updated information straight to your desktop. You can monitor news, job listings, personals, and classifieds. More and more sites offer feeds, which you can identify by a small button that says either RSS or XML. However, if you click one of these links, you will most likely get a page full of code in your browser. To properly read the feed, you need an RSS reader, and we're going to tell you how to use one. For this article, we will use FeedDemon, a top-notch RSS reader that includes some very useful features.
To get more information on RSS, including news and reviews, read RSS: News you choose.
Navigate and read articles
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Featured utility
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FeedDemon |
Explore the world of RSS from your desktop.
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More RSS readers
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Active Web Reader |
View and read your Web feeds.
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NewsGator |
Subscribe to various syndicated news sites and have news delivered to your Outlook folders.
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RssReader |
Check newsfeeds for new headlines.
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When you first launch FeedDemon, you will see a toolbar and three panels. The panel on the left displays RSS feeds, called channels in FeedDemon, to which you are subscribed. The middle panel shows a list of articles within whichever channel is selected, and article content is displayed in the right-hand panel. Click a channel to display its articles, then click an article to display its content. The initial content will be a short description, so click the link in the article to load the complete text. To change channel groups, just click the drop-down box at the upper left beneath the menus. If you want to make FeedDemon look more like an e-mail client, click the View menu, choose Browser Position, and change it to Browser on Bottom.
Add channels and channel groups
FeedDemon comes preloaded with a bunch of channels, but you will want to add your own. The program lets you create new channel groups to organize your channels. As an example, create a group for CNET by clicking the File menu, then New, and choose New Channel Group. In the wizard that pops up, indicate you want a new, empty channel group. Click Next, enter CNET, click Next again, then click Finish. An empty CNET channel group will appear. To add a channel, go to the Download.com RSS page and click the All Downloads link beneath New Releases. Copy the URL from the address bar of your browser, which should be showing a page full of XML code. Go back to FeedDemon and select New from the File menu, then click New Channel. Click Next on the wizard that pops up. The URL you copied should automatically be pasted into the URL field in the New Channel wizard. Click Next again and choose the channel group in which you want your new channel to appear. Click Next once more, then click Finish.
Create filters
When you accumulate many articles from your various feeds, it can become difficult to find specific information. FeedDemon includes a few useful tools for finding articles. The Filter tool only shows articles that contain a keyword you specify. To use it, find the Filter bar at the top of the list of articles (you may have to select Show Filter Bar from the View menu). Type a keyword directly into the Filter bar. For example, if you were looking at a listing of apartments for rent, you might want to enter 1BD to search for one-bedroom apartments. Press Enter, and FeedDemon only displays articles containing that keyword. To go back to the full article list, click the drop-down control for the Filter bar and set the keyword to (none). Whenever you find an article you want to save for later, select it, then click the Edit menu. Choose Copy to News Bin, and the article will be saved in a News Bin, which you can access in the left-hand panel.
Set a watch
One of the most useful features of FeedDemon is the ability to set a watch, an automatic search through all your incoming feeds for a specific keyword. For example, you could enter ICQ as a watch. If any article in any of the feeds you subscribe to mentions ICQ, the article will be included under the Watch list. To set a watch, open the File menu, choose New, then select New Watch. Enter a title for it in the dialog box that comes up, then enter a search term in the keyword field. Click Add to put the search term into the keyword list. Click Ok and your watch will be active, and it will appear in the Watches list in the left panel. The Watches panel shows how many articles have come in with each keyword. Click any of your watches to see the articles it has caught.
Wayne Cunningham is the senior editor at Download.com. He's a gearhead geek who likes putting together computers and messing around with configuration files.
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