Feed Demon Review It's pretty bad when someone makes up an acronym and can't decide what its supposed to mean. Although RSS ( RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication - take your pick ) may be name challenged, its potential for sharing information is without compare. When RSS was developed, keeping up to date suddenly got a whole lot easier. The idea behind RSS is for webmasters to post an XML or RSS file called a news feed that contains summaries of news items and links to the complete articles. Feeds cover all sorts of topics such as news, sports, entertainment as well as new product announcements, general knowledge or corporate information. To access this information, you use a news aggregator to display the available items and the links to the entire article. You won't find a better news aggregator than FeedDemon. Now you no longer have to click endlessly through huge web sites to find the information you want. FeedDemon allows you to quickly scan the available articles and read only those that you're interested in. You can also use the filter features in FeedDemon to automatically search for articles on specific topics. Don't think that FeedDemon is only for CNN junkies or those who read five newspapers a day; newsfeeds cover every topic you can think of. Join the RSS revolution and see what you're missing. Download FeedDemon and follow along with the examples below. If you're interested in creating your own RSS feeds, check out the Broadcast Builder Review page. Configuration All Feed Demon asks for during the setup is which channels you want loaded as defaults. If you don't like them, you can easily delete them later. For now, select them all. The installation will give you a brief outline of the user interface which we'll cover in more detail below. Reading News Feeds The user interface of FeedDemon looks like a browser that's been split into three columns. Nothing could be easier than reading newsfeeds with FeedDemon; just follow these three steps. 1) The left column is called the channel bar. Click a channel that you want to access. This will bring up a list of available articles in the news item list located in the middle column. 2) Click on any item in the news item list and it will appear in the browser located in the right column. 3) The short description of the news item will contain a link to the entire article. Clicking the link will bring up the entire article in the browser. It's that simple. You'll remember that you chose to load lots of categories which don't seem to be showing up. To access all of these categories, click the down arrow next to the text field just below "Help" on the top menu bar. This is the channel selector. Click on a different channel type and notice that all of the channels under "Channel Group" change. For this example, return to "Favorite Channels" after you've looked through some of the others. Clicking on the "Ask Yahoo" channel will bring up a list of articles in the center column. Please note that RSS items constantly change so you won't see the exact items shown in the screenshots. The list structure, however, will be similar. The list in the browser will be more complete as shown below. You've found all of your preloaded feeds and know how to read them. The problem with reading a browser while in column form is that involves lots of scrolling and really isn't that easy. Fortunately, FeedDemon allows you to change the look, location and size of the windows with just a few clicks. 1) Click on "view" on the top menu bar and move your mouse over "Browser Postition"to bring up the options shown below. 2) Change the window view from being side by side to top and bottom using the bottom two commands. 3) Maximize or hide the browser by either using the top two commands or by using hotkeys F11 and SHIFT F11 respectively. These options can also be found by clicking on the arrow next to the left icon on the browser menu bar shown below. There is also an option under the view menu to hide the channel bar as well. Now that you can actually see the whole page, you may want to change the look of the page contents. 1) Click on the Style button on the browser menu bar shown below: 2) This brings up the following list of styles that the list of news items will look like. A few of the styles are shown below; from left to right they are, Default, DotBox Gray, and PopBox Green. Try all of them until you find one you're comfortable with. The browser also supports tabbed pages. Open a new page in a new tab by holding down the SHIFT key while clicking on the link. CTRL + T opens an empty tab while CTRL + F4 will close a tab. An icon in the browser menu bar, found to the left of the "style" button mentioned above, will open the page in an external browser. You can elect to always open a page in an external browser by changing the appropriate setting under the Tools > Options > Browsing button on the top menu bar. Getting New Feeds That's fine if all of your interests fall under the default categories listed but chances are you'll want to see something else. With FeedDemon, adding new channels is easy. For this example, we'll add the RSS feed from The Shareware Genie website using three techniques. The first technique uses the new channel command found in the menu bar above the news item list (center column). 1) Click on the New Channel button which opens the New Channel window. 2) There are three options available; choose "I will enter the URL of the newsfeed". If a site has several RSS feeds, they are often listed in an OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) directory. By reading this directory, you can get all the feeds at once instead of getting them individually. The example we are using has only one feed and no OPML directory available. Click Next. 3) Type in the URL of the site you want to check. For this example, use www.sharewaregenie.com. Make sure the "auto-discover and verify the newsfeed" checkbox is selected. Click next. 4) The newsfeed will automatically be found and you will be asked where you want the new feed to be placed. For this example, choose the favorites group and click next. 5) For an RSS feed to be automatically found, the main page of the URL contains a link command containing the location of the RSS feed. Some sites don't include the link command and cannot be automatically found. Some sites post one or both of the following graphics that have links to the RSS feeds. Right click on one of the graphics, copy the shortcut, and paste it in the URL text box if the feed isn't automatically found. 6) If the shareware genie RSS feed is not already in one of your other groups, it will be added to the favorites group. 7) If you already have the shareware genie RSS feed in one of your other groups, you will be asked if you want to copy the existing newsfeed. If you don't copy the existing newsfeed, the new one must be renamed. The next technique uses FeedDemon's auto discovery method which checks for RSS feeds in every website that you look at on the browser. The procedure is simple. 1) Type in the URL of your choice in the browser's URL address window. For this example, we'll use www.sharewaregenie.com. 2) The pop up window below will appear letting you know that FeedDemon has auto discovered an RSS feed. If a site has no RSS feeds, this window will not appear. 3) Click on the icon in the lower right corner that was mentioned in the pop up window and is shown below. Cicking this icon will display a list of available RSS feeds from the site in a pop up window as shown in the picture below. Some sites have many RSS feeds available and the entire list will be displayed. At the time of this writing, The Shareware Genie has only one RSS feed. 4) Click on the feed shown in the list and the new channel window will open with the URL of the RSS feed filled in. If you want to find even more feeds, check the help section of FeedDemon. There are tips and links to a great many RSS feeds. Finding what you want RSS feeds can be similar to search results on a search engine; sometimes you just get too much information. The creators of FeedDemon anticipated that problem by building in filter, watch, and search features. One way to keep up with a new developments is to create a watch. A watch can be thought of as a custom channel based on specific interests. It checks all channels for incoming news items with specified keywords in the headline or in the entire article, and then stores it in the custom channel under the watch category. If you're tracking a news story, want to keep up with movies releases, be alerted when an artist releases a new CD then a watch is perfect. Items that match the specified keywords are put in the watch for easy reference. It's as if you're creating a custom channel based on specific interests. When testing the watch function, I wanted to get more than one match for news items so I chose a subject that was very popular in current news. At the time this review was written, a breaking news story was steriod use by Major League Baseball players. For your own evaluation, choose any current popular subject and you'll probably get matches. Creating a watch is easy. 1) Click on the arrow to the right of the "New Channel" buttom which brings up the drop down menu shown below. 2) Select "New Watch" and the window shown below pops up. You can add as many keywords as you want; just type it in the text box and click the add button. For this example, I just typed in "steroids" and named the watch "Steroid Use". The options on the right allow you to choose if you want to search the headline or entire article. For this example, both options were selected. For a more specific watch, you can select "match all keywords" as well as "match case". 3) Click the "OK" button and a pop up box will appear asking if you want to check the current news items for watch keywords. Select yes and FeedDemon will start looking through ALL of the channels for matches. 4) The Steroid Use watch returned five items and shows up on the channel bar like this: 5) Click on the watch and the articles will appear in the news item list as shown below. Use the techniques mentioned above for reading channels to access the watch articles. 6) The watch just created acts like a new channel and will add new items from ANY channel as long as it matches the specified keywords. If you only want to check one channel for a certain keyword, you can use the filter option. 1) Click on the "Show Filter Bar" icon on the menu bar above the news item column. 2) Type in the keyword you want to use. For this example, I used "Steroids". You'll notice that all article not related to "Steroids" will not be shown. Selecting "(none)" from the Filter Bar text area will display all of the available feeds. In some cases, you want to add your own items to a custom channel and don't want any added automatically. A News Bin will do this. Creating a News Bin is as easy as creating a watch. 1) Select the "New Channel" dropdown menu as mentioned above. 2) Select "New News Bin" and the window below will open. This is real tough - you just have to pick a name for your News Bin. I picked "My favorite steroid stories" and clicked "OK". 3)The image below shows how the new News Bin showed up on the channel bar. Now you probably want to add some articles to your News Bin. 4) Right click on the article the want to add and the pop up menu shown below will come up. 5) Select "Copy to News Bin" and a list of available news bins comes up. Select the news bin you want to use and the article will be copied there. There's even more ways to control your channels but the object here is to get you started and not to rewrite the help files. Many settings can be found by using the hotkey F8 or by clicking on the "Tools" button on the top menu bar and then selecting "Options". Further controls on how often a channel is updated or how long an item is kept can be found by right clicking the channel and selecting "Channel Properties" from the pop up menu. Other features are fully explained in FeedDemon's excellent help files. Other Features More advanced users may want to export articles they find to their own RSS feeds or to a Blog. This is easily done in FeedDemon. To post an article to a blog - 1) Select the article you want to publish to a blog. 2) Click on the "Tools" option on the top menu bar and then "Blog this news item". 3) A drop down menu will contain the options "Default Blog Publishing Tool" and "Configure Blog Publishing Tool" which allow you to add your favorite blog tool. You'll also notice on the picture above that there's an option for Broadcast Builder. Although it's written by a different software company, Broadcast Builder has a menu option called "Add to FeedDemon Blogthis list" which placed it in the menu shown above. Check out the Broadcast Builder review for more details. 4) For this example we'll select Broadcast Builder as the blog tool. Below shows what FeedDemon exports to the Broadcast Builder Blog Editor. Other export formats available are OPML and RSS. An RSS export will export a single channel in RSS format while an OPML export will export an entire channel group in OPML format. To export a channel to RSS format, just select the channel to export, click on "File" in the top menu bar and then click on "Export Channel to RSS file..". As mentioned earlier, OPML directories are lists of RSS feeds. To create your own directory, just select a channel then click "Files" and select "Export Channel Group to OPML file" from the drop down menu. The OPML file you create will be a list of all of the RSS feeds in the channel you selected. You can't export Watches to an OPML file. Conclusion and Registration The growing number of sites with RSS feeds prove that RSS is not only here to stay but will be the major source of information in a few years. RSS will move into every aspect of the internet but you'll be left in the dark without a good news aggregator to view it. So say goodbye to mass emails at work, forget about monthly email newsletters, and thankfully leave behind the tedious searches through news sites to find the information you're looking for. If you don't want to be left out in the cold, you NEED FeedDemon. The reasonable registration fee makes it easy to join the modern world and get the information you need faster than ever before. If you're interested in making your own RSS feeds, check out Broadcast Builder Enterprise, Pro or Standard. You can download the trial version of FeedDemon by clicking on the button below. 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