NewsGator Inbox - NewsPage

Hey if you like what you see, let me know!
If you don't like what you see.....let me know that too!
I would love your feed back, good or bad!

Now that we are familiar with the folder structure there is some additional functionality that we can explore. When the folders are setup, or automatically downloaded from NewsGator Online, something that NewsGator calls the NewsPage is built into the folders that are created. I have found that this usually is only for the top level folders like “My Clippings” or “My News”. However it will also be a tool present in the Category folders, if you have set them up (Such as, News or International).

The NewsPage is basically a customizable newspaper style view that fills your Outlook reading pane. It is not fully customizable but you will find several options that you can change to meet your needs. Before I get into what you can customize I should probably explain what the NewsPage will is and what it gives you. It cannot be manipulated like Outlook views for email where there is a list of feeds and a viewing window. It will essentially fill the entire reading pane in Outlook. It will also have 3 main parts as a default; these are Most Recent Posts, Options, and Overview. Two of these are dependent upon the folder that you have highlighted in the folder tree. The Options section will remain the same for all folders and will provide you with buttons for “Refresh” and “Search for Feeds”. The Most Recent Posts provides a list of the headlines and in default mode, it provides the full post from the feed. You can scroll down to view each new unread posting and you can select each one to read further. I will get into some of the other functionality for this section in later posts.

The Overview gives a listing of the number of unread posts that are in each feed folder that is under the folder you have highlighted. So for example if you have the International folder highlighted and in my example all you have in that folder is the feed from the BBC, then the Overview provides the total unread posts for this one feed. However if you highlight the News folder, which in my case houses MSNBC, NY Times and Wired it provides a listing for the number of unread posts for each feed in that folder. This feature also rolls up to the top level “My News” folder as well. It will have a listing for all of the unread posts for each feed that is held in the lower level folders.

Now you are probably wondering, “How do I customize this view?” Well, if you click on “+ Customize NewsPage” button on the top right of the NewsPage window you will launch two new windows simultaneously. The first is the NewsGator Inbox Options window and the second will be the NewsPage Options window. The first window is what will customize the NewsPage views. The first thing to notice is that you can turn off the sidebar which effectively eliminates both the Options and Overview sections from the view. So now in your view pane all you have is the Most Recent Posts. From this window you can also select Headlines only, Headlines with summaries or Full posts. I chose the full posts mainly because a lot of the feeds that I view have photos with them and you will not receive the photos in either of the other views. Another nice feature is that you can change the number of posts that the Most Recent Posts window shows in one page. You can select any number up to 100 posts. By changing this number you are affecting the number of posts that the Most Recent Posts view will bring to the viewing pane in the Headlines list.

Next time I will get into the Most Recent Posts view a little more and some of the tools that it has with it.