FeedDemon – Attention Report

So as I noted previously the Attention Report is found in the Reports dropdown list in the tool bar at the top of the Reading Pane and provides several tools to help you manage your subscriptions. The Attention Report shows somewhat graphically which feeds you spend the most time reading and the last time that something was posted to that subscription. This can help you decide which subscriptions are valuable to you and if you want to keep them. The logic between how the attention bars are created is relatively simple. FeedDemon will look at; how many times you have visited the feed, the number of items in the feed that you’ve read, flagged or clipped (with each carrying their own weight, meaning since you can mark as read without reading, the flagged items will carry more weight in the calculation) and lastly how many items in the feed were picked up by the watch.

The NewsGator team has also built additional functionality into this screen so that you do not have to go anywhere else in order to update your subscriptions. If you select the Feed Title you will be taken to the newspaper view of that feed. Next to the title are two windows boxes overlapping. If this is selected you will be taken to the main news page on that particular subscription.

Next to this little icon is a downward pointing arrow which will open a dropdown list. The first item in the dropdown list will be feed home (This is the same place that the two overlapping windows icon takes you to). The next item in the drop down allows you to mark the feed as read, as expected by the name this will mark all of the posts within that feed subscription as read. This is followed by an Unsubscribe option. This will remove the subscription from you list. The next option was slightly perplexing because it is a copy function and I am not sure yet when it might be used. This function will either copy the feed home page or the feed address. The home page is the same place that the two overlapping windows took us which is the basically the home page of the site that you subscribed to. The second option which copies the feed address will take you to the online version of the actual RSS feed within the subscription. The last option from this dropdown is the Properties for that particular feed. A new window will launch when you select this option. The new window has the look and feel of a properties window in Outlook and will give you all of the specifics for that particular feed. I will review this more thoroughly in a later post though.

Within the Attention Report functionality you have the ability to reset the attention ratings at any time. Simply click on the eraser at the far right of the feed listing. This will reset the calculations and the graphical bar will disappear. Lastly there is a small folder icon on the top right of the list. By selecting this you will change the report from a ranked feed view to a view that provides a ranking by category folder.

That wraps up the Attention report. Next time I will look at how to customize the reading pane tool bar by adding or removing icons and tools.