NewsGator Online – Folder Review

So I have been working more with the folders and the built in functionality that goes along with them. I found that there are some features that can enhance your viewing experience.

The first is “Mark Items Read on View”, which as the title suggests marks posts as read when you scroll past them in the reading window. After scrolling down the list of headlines and clicking on the arrow to take you to the next page, all of the posts that you just viewed are removed from the folder. The number of unread posts also decreases on the folder tree for the folder that you are viewing.

As I discussed in the post on February 21st, NewsGator Online – Adding Feeds & Creating Folders can either be hidden or they can stay constant within the folder tree. Basically the “Hidden” feature removes the folder from the visible tree once you have read all of the posts for that folder or if there the folder does not contain any unread posts. If you do not hide the folders and there are no new posts, no unread post or if you have read all of the posts for that folder it will remain in the folder tree but will return to a regular font (un-bold). The number of posts will also disappear, indicating that there are no unread posts.

If you leave the folders as unhidden and click on that folder that does not indicate that it has any unread posts it will appear empty. What will appear in the reading pane is “There are no new posts to display for this selection. To display older items click here.” When I clicked “click here” it did not work like I expected it too. I was expecting to see some posts that were marked as read but what actually came up was a note about recent changes, the addition of the tags function (which I still have to review) and a listing of the Top Tags. So based on this it seems that once you mark a post as read it is removed from your folders. My suggestion is if there is anything that you see that you want to review again later that you should save it to “My Clippings” (See my post on February 23rd, NewsGator Online – Review (Cont’d)).


Another interesting phenomenon I have noticed is that NewsGator works fantastic with Internet Explorer, but there are some inconsistencies with Firefox and with Safari. When I was reviewing the folders in Firefox I found that sometimes, not always but occasionally, after reading all of the posts for a folder and then switching to a new folder, the original folder that I was reading did not hide. I double checked my settings and I had selected the hide function. Even after I refreshed the feeds the folder remained. And in some rare occasions I found that the unread count did not update either. This was more rare then the hiding of the folders.

I noticed these inconsistencies more frequently when using Safari on the MAC. In one instance for some unknown reason only one of the folders hid after I finished reading all the posts. In this same instance one of the folders that did not hide also did not clear the unread count even though when I clicked on the folder it was empty. On another occasion when I was on the last folder with unread feeds, the posts in that folder disappeared like I had read them all when in actuality I had not read any yet. Interestingly when I clicked on the click here, mentioned above, the list of posts came up and I was able to read them. Safari was the only program where that actual worked as I expected it.

In both Firefox and Safari, in these instances, in order to get the folder to hide like they are supposed to I had to go into Settings and remove the setting “Only show folders with unread items”. Then I saved my user settings and all of the folders came into view on the folder tree. Next I went back into Settings and reversed it, then I saved my user settings again. This was effective in hiding all of the folders without unread posts. These inconsistencies did not come up every time that I used these browsers but often enough that it was noticeable.