Feed Demon

Introduction

Staying up-to-date with your bookmarked web pages is time consuming, tedious, and nearly impossible. Luckily most web pages support RSS technology which you can subscribe to with a feed reader. This is where Feed Demon comes into play. It is possibly one of the best RSS readers out there that, like other readers, allows you manage your favorite RSS subscriptions easily and conveniently. Feed Demon does all the work of telling you what web sites have posted new content allowing you to spend time reading content rather doing the work yourself. This is not all Feed Demon has to offer though. Read on.

Getting Started

Begin by downloading and installing the trial version of Feed Demon. Check out the screenshots and features list too. Once you have Feed Demon installed, you can load some of your favorite web sites in your web browser and look for these kinds of icons on the page:

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Clicking one of those icons will usually bring up an XML page or feed reader launch page. Normally, you will want to right-click on the icon and save the link in Feed Demon to subscribe. Here is a view of my subscriptions within Feed Demon (categorized by folder):

Those folders with numbers in parenthesis show how many posts that I have not read yet.

Settings

Feed Demon is very configurable but I’m going to touch upon the best features of the application. The following assumes you have installed Feed Demon and are subscribed to a few feeds.

The first thing to do is configure your cache so that it is easy to backup. Do this by selecting File->Manage Cache from the main menu and change the default directory to where you backup all other application data (see my earlier post about Data Management). Example:

Next configure your options by selecting Tools->Options from the main menu:

(General)

(Reading)

(Browsing)

(System)

(Appearance)

Features

One of my favorite features is the ability to stay in sync with content read at home, work, or any other location. Feed Demon does this by maintaining your subscription list via the NewsGator online service. The way to do this is to right click on the folder you want to synchronize, select folder properties from pop-up menu, and place a checkmark in the “Synchronize this folder with NewsGator”. Like so:

From this point, you can then sign into your NewsGator account and pick and choose which feeds are to be part of which locations. For example (from my NewsGator account):

Not only can you synchronize your subscriptions but also your “news bins”! News bins, by the way, are a way in which to categorize posts from other feeds in a folder of your choice. Here is a screenshot of my news bins, both of which, are synchronized:

References

• FeedDemon 2.1 Release Notes
• FeedDemon 2.1 Quick Reference Sheet