Nick Bradbury

How I Use FeedDemon

In his post about switching to Windows, Jeremy Zawodny mentions that he's trying out FeedDemon but he's not sure whether it suits him. By default, FeedDemon acts much like an email client simply because that's how most people are used to receiving information, and that's probably not Jeremy's style - but I'm willing to bet that FeedDemon can be customized to meet his needs.

Chances are, there are a number of power users like Jeremy who don't like the email metaphor, and quite honestly I'm one of them - I don't use FeedDemon like an email client at all. Instead, I've configured it in a way that lets me scan the headlines from a couple hundred feeds with very little time or effort:

• On the "Reading" page in options, I've enabled the "Mark all news items as read when exiting a channel" and "Mark all news items as read when exiting a channel group" settings so that I never have to manually mark anything as read
• I've maxmized the browser (F11) so that the news item list is hidden
• I changed the newspaper style to "Expando," which is great for scanning headlines
• Rather than clicking each channel (feed) one-by-one, I use the "Group Newspaper" to view everything that's new in every channel in the active group
• When I find a link that I want to remember, I drag-and-drop it from the browser to a news bin (did you know you could do that?)

If you're trying out FeedDemon and aren't sure whether you like how it works, try using it like I do and see if it makes a difference.

You know RSS is big when...

...The Family Guy has an RSS feed.

Dexter Cartoon for Jan 7, 2005

Dexter RSS feed

The Chris Pirillo Show

Kudos to supreme geek Chris Pirillo for launching his first live broadcast today. Be sure to add his feed with MP3 enclosures to the new "Podcasters" group in FeedDemon 1.5.

Six Apart buys LiveJournal

Looks like the rumours were true: Six Apart has bought LiveJournal. Here's LiveJournal's announcement about the acquisition, and here's Six Apart's.

MothaB Show

Check out The MothaB Show, created by long-time FeedDemon/TopStyle user Matt Zur. Matt's first podcast about women dating "bad boys" will likely strike a chord with many male geeks.

CNN does RSS

Paul Beard reports that CNN.com has RSS feeds (via Dave Winer).

If you're viewing this in FeedDemon, just click this OPML link to subscribe to them all.

Bradbury Software Donates Over $8000 for Tsunami Aid

Bradbury Software has just made a donation of $8044.80 to the American Red Cross International Response Fund to aid those affected by the Indian Ocean Tsunamis. My thanks to those who helped make this donation possible by purchasing TopStyle or FeedDemon.

RSS reader market share

I've seen a number of posts lately in which the market share of RSS readers is determined by the number of hits the author sees from each RSS reader in his or her server logs, and while FeedDemon is always ranked near the top, I can't help but point out how flawed this method is. For starters, FeedDemon defaults to updating feeds - that is, checking for new items - every three hours, whereas many RSS readers default to updating every single hour. And unlike a number of RSS readers, FeedDemon honors the feed's <ttl>, so that the feed's author can specify how often it's updated. A large number of feeds (including some of my own) specify a <ttl> of 1440 minutes, so that the feed is updated once a day rather than once an hour.

Perhaps more importantly, FeedDemon only automatically updates feeds in the current channel group. This approach has caused some controversy with a handful of customers, but I stand by this design. Before creating FeedDemon I studied existing RSS readers, and it struck me how bandwidth-unfriendly many of them were. In my opinion, having a huge treeview of feeds that are constantly updating is wasteful - not only does it unnecessarily consume bandwidth, but it also slows down the application. It makes far more sense to me to regularly update only the feeds you regularly read.

In other words, a well-behaved RSS reader like FeedDemon is designed not to hit your server very frequently - so basing RSS reader market share on your server logs is wildly inaccurate.

FeedDemon sponsors IndiBlog Awards

I meant to blog this a while ago, but better late than never: Bradbury Software is among the sponsors of the IndiBlog awards.