FeedDemon – Prefetching

If you like to work offline, you will really find this next tool very useful.  FeedDemon has built in a tool called Prefetching that will basically download links and images for each of your posts so that they are all available for you to review when working offline. Basically what it is it goes out and gathers all the information that you might need for each post.  As I said this includes images and links.  The really interesting part though is the links.  If you have prefetching setup you will be able to visit external links without an internet connection or working offline. 

As with everything in FeedDemon, there are several ways in which to setup (or deactivate) the prefetching option.  The first option can be found under the File menu (for more info on the file menu see the post “FeedDemon - File Menu”).  Click on File and then on ‘Prefetch Items for Offline Reading…’.  This will launch a new window which has a way for you to manually Prefetch Unread Items.  From here you can add a couple of options.  The first allows you to include your flagged items in the prefetch.  This is because typically the tool would only perform the prefetching for unread items.  The second option will take you offline once the prefetching is completed.  These are both check boxes (reminder, checked means enabled).  On the bottom right you will see a button for OK and one for Cancel.  As you would expect Ok activates prefetching and Cancel closes the window.   At the bottom left is another button labeled as ‘Options’.

The options window has two tabs.  The first is labeled ‘Settings’ and has tools that allow you some control over the tool.  At the  top you can set the maximum number of items that you want to prefetch.  The default is 500, but you can adjust it to any number between 1 and 2500.  The larger the number the longer it will take to complete the prefetch.   Another option available at the top tells FeedDemon to skip over posts that are above whatever size you indicate.  The default is 256 KB but you can reset it to any size between 16 and 999 KB.  By overlooking larger files the prefetching will go faster.  The last option on the Settings Tab allows you to setup the prefetching function to run automatically when you open FeedDemon or when it runs its normal updates.   The default has it set to follow the manual process described above.  Please note that if you choose to have the Auto-prefetch enabled it may slow down your normal feed synchronization, this is because it has to download more information off the internet to support the offline viewing. 

The second tab, Feeds, gives you the opportunity to select exactly which subscription folder(s), or clipping folder(s), you want to prefetch.  It also gives you more granularity because by  opening each folder you can select only certain feeds that you prefer to prefetch.  There are a couple of extra buttons to help you here too.  These are pretty self explanatory at least the bottom two which select all the feeds and clippings or none of them.  The one at the top is for Options and only activates when you have selected a folder or a particular feed.  This set of options opens another new window with three additional options.  From here you have the ability to select with folders or feeds will prefetch images and/or links.  The default is that it will for each folder/feed that is selected to prefetch.  The other option here will let you select the number links that will be downloaded per post with the default being 3, but you can choose any number between 1 and 99.  Once you have finished your configurations you can click Ok and close the window.  This will take you back to the manual operation window. 

The other way to get to the Prefetch options, which is limited to that specific feed, is to right click on the feed from your folder tree or subscription list.  Then select Feed Properties and go to the ‘Advanced’ tab.  From here you can set the options specifically for the feed that you chose from the list.  Towards the bottom you will see a  check box that says Include in prefetch, again checked means it is enabled.  There is also an options button below that.   The option window opens which has the same options as I described for the folder level options in the previous paragraph.