FeedDemon – Reports Tool

In the last post I left off with the tab creation button for use with the browsing capabilities within FeedDemon. I will pick up there and look at the Reports button today.

The Reports button is actually a drop down list. From here you can select to go to your FeedDemon home page or you can see a list of popular topics. The Popular topics will be updated from the online version of NewsGator and will identify posts that are popular across the internet. This section will have two parts, one which will identify the popular topics, if any, that are located within any of your subscriptions. The second section will have a list of what is popular in other people’s subscriptions. If something from the list catches your eye, you can select the link and go to the page. If you like what you see you can use the RSS Auto-discovery tool to subscribe to that page. This is really a pretty nice feature that makes FeedDemon user friendly and helps you to support your habit for more information at your finger tips!

So the Reports dropdown list provides several tools to help you manage your subscriptions. Following the Popular Topics, the next item is an attention report. This shows somewhat graphically which feeds you spend the most time reading. This can help you decide which subscriptions are valuable to you and if you want to keep them. 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. I will look at this functionality in a future post.

The next selection from the list is Dinosaurs. No not the prehistoric reptiles, but rather a list of any subscriptions that have not had a new post in the last 30 days. 30 days is the default you can also change that to include any subscriptions that have not been updated with a post in the last 10, 60 or 120 days if you would like. The dinosaurs are followed in the dropdown list by a History of Auto-Discovered Feeds. This will sort them by day, as in today, yesterday, etc. There is the orange RSS button at the front of each feed which is the subscribe button (I will cover how to add feeds in a future post). You can also select the magnifying glass at the end of the feed to see a preview, which will look similar to the newspaper view in FeedDemon. Lastly you can select the red X at the end of the feed which will remove it from the list.

The final selection from the dropdown list is a listing of feeds that have HTTP Errors. Here is where my technical background may be a little thin. I am not sure what this would give you. I suspect it will help you troubleshoot problems with any feed that might have HTTP errors, but again I am not sure. If any of you know, please feel free to leave a comment so we can all learn.

That rounds out the Report button. Next time I will discuss the reading pane options which are in the next dropdown list in the tool bar.