FeedDemon – Feed Properties

As I said last time there were several aspects of FeedDemon that I indicated I would cover at a later date. This time we will look at the next item on the list which is Feed Properties.

So the first thing that you have to do is select one of the feeds from your folder tree or subscription list. Then there are two ways to get to the Feed Properties. The first is through the Edit Menu at the top left of the window. After clicking on Edit, select Feed Properties from the drop down list. The second is to right click on the feed that you want to see the properties for and then select Feed Properties from the list. Either of these options will bring you to the same place. They will open the a new window for that individual feed’s properties.

When the new window opens you will notice that there are four tabs across the top. The first one is the General tab. As the name suggests this tab will provide the ‘General’ information about the feed. This information includes the title that you named the feed when you setup the subscription. This is fully customizable and allows you to change it to what ever name you desire. The next information is the actual feed url, so the web address for where the posts that you receive as a part of this feed come from. This is followed by the homepage for the source of the feed. For instance if you have MSNBC top stories as a feed then the Homepage would be http://www.msnbc.msn.com/. There are also 4 options found at the bottom of the window. Each of these have check boxes to indicate if they are enabled or not (fyi - checked means enabled). The first Enables the feed. If you disable (or uncheck) this option you will no longer receive updates to that feed. The next turns on the analytical tools capabilities to include this feed in the statistics. The next one makes it so that this feed is excluded from all watches. Basically what that means is that the feeds that are in your keyword, or specialized watches will not include any feeds that you have subscribed to and enabled this function for. The last one includes this feed in your desktop alerts so that you will be notified based on the settings that you have setup in the desktop alert settings, when new items arrive.

The next tab is for updating. In this tab you will find the ability to tell FeedDemon how many posts (or items) to keep in the feed folder for this particular feed. The second part of this tab will be enabled if you choose not to sync this feed with NewsGator Online. This will allow you to set the frequency (how often) with which FeedDemon checks the feed for new items. If you are sync-ing with NewsGator Online then it will be automatic. This tab is followed by the tab for the feed’s statistics. Again if you selected or enabled the Collect Attention Data in the General tab then FeedDemon will collect data on how often you interact with this particular feed. You can use the information to make decisions on which feeds to keep and which to eliminate. This tab will include information about things like the number of posts, the number of unread posts, how many times you have visited this feed, how many times you have flagged or emailed it, etc.

The last tab is the Advanced tab. This tab includes several options for automating the feed. The first option sets up the feed to automatically download enclosures (also known as podcasts). The next item will allow you to unsubscribe automatically from a feed if it does not update very often. You can set it to drop any feeds that have not updated (or sent out any feeds) in that last however many days. The number of days is up to you and can be set to any number up to 999. When you select this option FeedDemon will confirm that this is exactly what you want to do with a pop up window. It does this because it could eliminate the feed without any warning.

You can also set the feed up to ignore any posts that are older then a certain number of days. The default is 7 but you can make it higher or lower. This is followed by the prefetch function. You can activate this function for the feed from here. You can also set up the options associated with prefetch. The last options at the bottom allow you to choose a different Newspaper style for each feed. So if you want to have a different view for all your feeds or just a feed you can select if from here. To the left of the Newspaper Style are two buttons. The first will validate the feed through a feed validation service to ensure that is a live feed and is working properly. It will open your default web browser to complete the task. The last option is to view the source. This option actually opens up the source code for the feed into notepad (or your default text editor).

Next time I will continue this series with a look at Importing and Exporting from FeedDemon.