FeedDemon's prefetching feature is a powerful tool that enables you to follow links and view images in your feeds even when you don't have an internet connection.
If you're having trouble using this feature (for example, if it looks like your articles aren't being prefetched), here are a few things to keep in mind:
- FeedDemon only prefetches unread (and, optionally, starred) articles - it won't prefetch articles you've already read.
- By default, FeedDemon won't prefetch anything older than 10 days, and it won't prefetch more than 500 articles. These defaults can be changed by clicking the "Prefetch" button in FeedDemon's options.
- Prefetch relies on Internet Explorer's browser cache for storage. If you've configured IE so that it uses very little disk space for its temporary Internet files, then there may not be enough space to store everything that needs to be prefetched.
- Related to the above, if you've told IE to delete its browser history on exit, then prefetched items will also be deleted.
- Articles in secure (https:) feeds are not prefetched
- Some feeds can't be prefetched because their servers don't allow it (for example, they don't permit caching of their content).
- FeedDemon only retrieves the text content of pages it prefetches - it won't download images, links, styles, etc., in linked pages. This often means that the pages don't look as you'd expect them to, but their text is still available for reading offline.