FeedDemon

I love Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon, both for the technology and for the responsive support from Nick. As version 1.10 is out the door, I figured I’d describe how I use FeedDemon, and how I’d like to use it.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a happy customer of Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon. Nick recently released version 1.10 and I figured I should explain how I use FeedDemon, and how I’d like to use it in the future.

Current Usage

When I get to work each morning, I plug in my USB memory key and fire up FeedDemon. FeedDemon starts updating the last channel group I had open. I choose update all channel groups from the tools menu, then go about my morning tasks, checking email, responding to voicemail etc. After all that is done I switch back to FD and begin checking the Channel groups.

I maximise the browser pane (F-11) and navigate to the next channel with unread items (C-PgDn). My browser pane is set to show only unread news, so I read each item in the browser pane, and click on any links that look interesting. I have FD set to open all links in an external browser, so the clicked links are sent to FireFox which opens them in a new tab without stealing focus (this is a feature of the tabbed browsing extensions). Once I have finished with that channel I hit C-PgDn again and repeat for the next channel, I have set FD to mark all items in a channel as read when exiting.

Once all channels in the current group are finished I hit C-M-PgDn to navigate to the next Channel Group. If the group has unread items, I begin the process described above, otherwise I hit C-M-PgDn and switch to the next channel group.

Once I’ve checked all channel groups I switch to FireFox and read each tab one at a time, closing any that I finish or don’t turn out to be as interesting as the feed implied. Then go about my day. I repeat the whole process again after lunch & in the early afternoon. At home, after dinner I do it again, rebooting from Linux into Windows just to use FD. It’s that good.

Ideal usage

Now, there are a few things that could make my day easier, there are also a few things I’d like to do with FD that I find difficult. As I mentioned, I use the ‘update all channel groups’ feature. I do this because the internet connection at work is somewhat unreliable and will fail if there are too many outgoing requests from one ID, Update All seems to fetch one at a time. However, I’d like to be able to run this update minimised, there are two ways I could do this, and I’m fine with either.

1. Context menu entry for the System tray icon
2. Have the update window be modeless.

I’d like a keyboard shortcut to ‘select next channel with unread items’ that will skip me past all the channel groups with no new items. It’ll only save me a few seconds, but it’d stop me from accidentally skipping over a whole channel group filled with new items, marking them all read.

I’m always on the lookout for new feeds, and it’d be great if FD did something to make this easier. I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking for here, but I’m hoping nick can come up with something.

I often find myself with links to thousands of feeds, I know for a fact that there are hundreds in there that vaguely interest me, and maybe one hundred that I’ll subscribe to. I’m looking for some way to have a ‘pending’ bucket that I can dump feeds into, then migrate interesting looking ones into the proper channel groups. Once a feed has been in the pending bucket for more than X days, it just disappears. Ideally I could just suck in a big OPML file and have FD dump all feeds I don’t currently subscribe to into the bucket.

Call for help

Well, that’s all I have. If there’s something I’m looking for that can already be achieved, let me know. If you have any questions about my usage of FD, just ask. I’d just like to thank Nick for this great piece of software, and I hope that providing this entry helps make it better in some way.