FeedDemon – Customize Reading Pane Toolbar (Vol.2)

So last time we end with the Internet Explorer button which we said launches whatever post you are looking at into Internet Explorer, outside of FeedDemon. The Internet Explorer button is followed by three little houses. The first house will take you to the home page that you have stored in your Internet Explorer settings (this will launch the webpage within FeedDemon, not launching internet explorer). The second house has a picture of a folder on it and will take you back to your subscriptions homepage within FeedDemon. This is where there is a list of the subscriptions that have unread items, as well as a listing of the feeds that you show the most and least attention to. The last little house has what looks like a little globe on it but it is really the little feed icon. This icon will open the main page related to the subscription that you have highlighted in the folder tree.

The next icon that you can add is another magnifying glass. This one has a red plus on it and it servers as a way to change the text size in the reading pane. The default is medium but depending on your monitor settings you might want it bigger or smaller. Simply click on this magnifying glass and select the setting that you prefer. This is followed by a printer icon. Once selected this function utilizes your default printer and settings to send to the printer. You will however you do have an opportunity to change the printer selected if you have multiple printers mapped to your computer. You can also change the settings before printing just as you would with any other document.

You will notice that the next non-default icon looks like an A supper imposed over a painters pallet or a paint wheel. This icon is the style button and will activate any time that you have the newspaper view displayed in the reading pane. Basically this icon allows you to change your newspaper view between six preloaded themes. Each one offers a little bit different view and some have additional viewing options. The one that I use for instance is called Surfer and it give the option of choosing either full posts, headlines with summaries, or just headlines, at the top of the newspaper list. Not all of the newspaper views offer this feature. Try them all and see which one you prefer! This is followed by what looks like a staircase with a bi-directional arrow next to it. This will resort your list of posts to the reverse order. So if you have them sorted by date with the newest posts on top, it will put the oldest ones on top. Or visa versa.

The last option is another magnifying glass. It is a little larger then the rest and gives you the option to search through your subscriptions for a certain topic. When you select this icon it will launch a new window. The top will have a text box where you can put in what you are looking for. Below that will be a list of your subscriptions so you can expand or narrow your search. You can also tell it to how to search for the keywords that you entered; titles, descriptions, whole words, only unread, only flagged or any combination of these. You can also select how far back chronologically you want the search to go. The results are returned in the reading pane and resemble a Google search.

We finally reached the end. As I said the NewsGator team has built a plethora of options into the toolbar so that you can customize it to meet your needs. Next time I will look at the options under the standard toolbar.