NewsGator Inbox Options – Add Subscriptions (Vol. 1)

Today we will dive deeper into the Tools within the NewsGator Inbox Options menu. The Update All Subscriptions is pretty self explanatory so I will start with the Add Subscriptions tool.

When you click on Add Subscriptions (within the drop down from the NewsGator Inbox button) a new window will launch which will give you a couple of options. The first is to simply enter the URL of the feed that you want to add. For instance if you wanted to add the feed for TwonSolo then you would simply enter http://www.twonsolo.com/feeds/posts/default into the box and select next. Then NewsGator goes out to find the feed. Once it is found it will ask you where you want to house it, or which folder to put it in. You can either select the top level My News folder or you can select a category to put it in. Then simply select the feed and click the arrow (>) between the two boxes and the feed will be placed into the folder that you selected. Then click “Next” and you will be presented with another option. If you want to customize the subscription you just added you can check the box in front of the sentence stating, “I want to change more properties of my new subscriptions” before you click Next. If not simply click Next without checking the box and NewsGator Inbox will finalize the sync and pull the latest feeds into the folder that you specified.

If you chose to customize the feed a new window will launch when you click Next called Subscription Settings. From here you can change the name of the feed to something you remember, something shorter, or if it comes across as numbers, you can give it a name. There are also a bunch of tabs on this new window that give you several other options. For instance under the “General” tab you can also set up the update frequency for the feed. Theoretically this would be a good tool if you only wanted updates a couple times per day or if you know that the feed is not updated often. This is because it is set up for minutes, you will enter the number of minutes that you want NewsGator Inbox to wait between updating the subscription. This is good for feeds that kick out tons of posts like Engadget or a news agency like MSNBC, but it doesn’t work so well for the Blog that your buddy writes and only updates every day or so. The reason I feel this way is because NewsGator Inbox expends resources to ping the feeds regardless of if there is something new posted. So it is basically wasting resources trying to find an update to your buddy’s Blog in the reference above. It would be nice if you could reduce some of the granularity and select days (or in some of my buddy’s blogs weeks or months!).

These tabs also give you the ability to choose to include the posts from the feed in the NewsPage view. You can also display a web page snapshot (not too sure what this does yet) and allow NewsGator to collect attention data for this feed, which I will get into in a later post. Another helpful tab is the “Folder” tab which gives you the option of creating a new folder for the feed or just adding the posts to the parent folder. I will explore this a little more and provide a review in an up coming post. The next tab is “Credentials” and this allows you to put in a user name and password for the feed if it is access restricted. There is also a tab for “Podcasts” where you can set your preference for podcast delivery, such as a link, attachment or Queue it up in FeedStation. Another thing I am not sure about, FeedStation, so I will have to investigate this as well. The final tab is “Advanced”. This tab is interesting because it allows you to set some criteria around the feed. For instance if you want to unsubscribe to a post if it doesn’t stay active you can have it automatically removed. All you have to do is select the check box and set the number of days that you want it to be inactive before it is removed. You can do the same thing for what they call a Test Drive. This allows you to setup the feed for a set number of days to try it out and then it will automatically be removed. The last tools allow you to set your style sheet and validate the feed.

So now that you have configured your settings click “OK” and the feed will be created. NewsGator Inbox will then launch the Update tool which will run for the new feed. The feed folder should be in your folder tree and any unread posts should automatically populate into the folder.

I will discuss the other two Add Subscription tools in the next post. Stay tuned.