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firstobject News Reader
Adding News Feeds
Feeds are generally indicated by one of the following icons: Adding a feed to your News Reader is often called "syndication." You may see a link for XML Syndication, or simply an XML or RSS or ATOM icon on the web page where you are reading a blog posting or news item. If you open this link your browser will usually display the actual XML (although in the case of ATOM the browser transforms the XML into HTML). The News Reader just needs the address (i.e. URL location or shortcut) of that XML web page, and it will do the rest. The easy way to add feeds is to right-click wherever you see the XML or RSS icon or link on syndicated websites and blogs, Copy Shortcut or Copy Link Location and paste into the top of the News dialog. Here are some sample RSS feeds you can copy into the News dialog.
A very powerful use of RSS is offered on msn Search, www.craigslist.org and other sites for searching and classified ads. If you do a search on a particular set of criteria, it provides an RSS link which you can copy into your News Reader to keep updated on that particular search. All you need to do is copy the RSS link from the bottom of the website's search results page into the News Reader after you have done the search, everything else is automatic. The News Reader will notify you when new postings are available, providing the item and a direct hyperlink to the article on the website. You would want to use specific criteria so you do not get too many hits (for example on craigslist: Washington D.C., "for sale", "computers & tech, "flat panel", $300-$360). Some weblogs do not display a "syndication" link or XML or RSS button. Often there is a way to get the feed by manually entering a version of the URL. For example on Blogger (Blogspot.com) sometimes you can just add atom.xml to the address (http://dturini.blogspot.com/atom.xml is the feed for http://dturini.blogspot.com/). If the blog is hosted on Xanga, change the home.aspx in the address to rss.aspx. In general you can do an Internet search on the domain name of the blog site and keywords like RSS ATOM XML and feed, to try to find out if anyone has reported a way to syndicate the news feed on that site. Managing News FeedsWhen you view (click) a feed in the News dialog list it is displayed in the Viewer which is a custom control for accessing feeds. In the Viewer, you can click on an item title link to launch your Internet browser for the full article, or right-click and choose Item Details to see the full feed information already downloaded for that item.
In the main News dialog, right-click a feed name in your list of feeds to get a context menu of actions that can be done on that feed. Use the Modify command in the News dialog list to change the feed title and schedule. The schedule indicates how often the feed should be checked (downloaded), such as "1 hour", "25 Min", "2 days" (with a 20 minute minimum). You should select this time based on how often the feed is updated on the web, and how often you want to see new updates. Use the Update Now command to download the feed immediately. This is rarely needed because feeds are automatically updated after the period of time specified in the schedule, and when the News Reader is started up it updates any feeds that are out of date. When a feed is updated, often many of the items are the same as the previous time the feed was updated, and some are new. When new items arrive, they are shown in the Notification Window which appears unobtrusively for a few seconds and then disappears. If you click on it, it will not disappear. The number of seconds until it disappears is shown in the caption. The Notification Window can be turned off and the number of seconds can be set in the Settings dialog.
From the Menu button you can access the major functions. Show New F7 opens up the Viewer with a list of new items from all of the feeds in order of arrival, with the most recently downloaded feed first. Mark All As Read will clear all New markings, while Update All will queue all feeds for immediate download. The Show Screen Saver action brings up a previoew of the screensaver animation (see below); it is just a way of seeing what the animation looks like without using the News Reader as a screensaver. The Settings dialog has settings that are stored in the registry under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ http\ shell\ open\ command\). If the option is unchecked it just runs iexplore.exe (Windows Internet Explorer).Find Ctrl+F brings up the Find dialog which allows you to enter search text (case sensitive) and the search results are displayed in the Viewer. How the News Reader Organizes your InformationFeeds are stored in the feedstatus.xml file. When you start up firstobject News, it reloads this file. The status contains not only the feed configuration, but the latest copy of the feed so that the latest download can be viewed and compared to newer downloads to determine what is new. Only the latest copy of the feed is kept; old copies of feeds are not archived. You can browse and search the feeds (and they will appear in the optional screensaver) even if your Internet connection is down. Minimize the News dialog to leave it running in the background. The firstobject News Reader icon is always in the system tray and supports right-click menu for Show New, Reset Window Positions, Exit, and double-click to show the News Dialog. The News Reader program runs as a "single instance" meaning that only one copy of the program runs at a time. If you start it up while it is already running, it activates the already running program. This keeps one copy of the feed database and one status for all feeds on your computer. Screen Saver
The firstobject News Reader program is just a plain small executable file. To set this up as your Windows desktop screensaver, you need a copy of it with an SCR extension (recommended filename The screensaver launched by an idle Windows Desktop utilizes the same News Reader process that is already running so that you get the most current download status and do not have two separate processes doing downloads. |
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Posted Release 1.2, September 30, 2005. Question or comment about this article? ©Copyright 2008 First Objective Software, Inc. All rights reserved. |
On the right are two example right-click menus showing how to copy the link from an XML icon in Internet Explorer and from an RSS hyperlink in Mozilla Firefox.
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With release 1.1, the firstobject News Reader has a screensaver that animates the feed items on your monitor (no multi-monitor support yet). You don't need to install it as a screensaver to see what the animation looks like; just select Show Screen Saver from the Menu button. Feeds are randomly selected and the items are moved around (a brief firstobject promotion is animated periodically or when there are no feeds to display). If any feed item captures your interest, press G to go to view the relevant feed in the Viewer. Press S to skip to another feed, and P to pause the animation.