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This Tutorial is for general users of the Internet. It will help you to learn BottomFeeder, a tool for working with the feeds provided by many websites.
ContentsBottomFeeder has been released as an Open Source program, under the Artistic License. When you download it, you agree to abide by this license.
ContentsThe following documents are available to help you get the most benefit from BottomFeeder:
Here are some Internet terms you probably already know:
And here are some new Internet terms you will see in this tutorial:
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Every tool exists to accomplish specific tasks in a larger social context. A plumber's wrench is for connecting pipes, but its larger purpose is to build sewage systems to prevent the spread of disease. So too with BottomFeeder; it is a tool for keeping up with changes to websites, but its larger purpose is to enhance your personal presence on the web.
ContentsDo a Google search on "quilting" and you get 644,000 hits. Overload!!!
When the telephone was first invented, people quickly realized it was a great business tool - a real improvement over the telegraph, a way to improve business productivity. A few businessmen installed telephones in their homes - for better communications with the office, of course. Their families found other uses, social uses, personal uses -- uses that quickly overwhelmed business uses. From then on, growth in the telephone network was exponential.
Limit the search to "Shaker quilting" and you get 3,500 hits. Still too many!
The same thing happened with the Internet. First scientists used it to e-mail each other and to share data files. Then, business people found all kinds of on-line, "e-commerce" uses: advertising, catalogs, sales, and intermediation. Along the way, as more and more people put computers in their homes, social and personal uses became dominant - e-mail, shopping, games, education, conferences, and on-line communities of all kinds.
"Shaker quilting in Minneapolis Minnesota" yields 10 hits. Manageable, but is this what you really want? Maybe the best websites are in Kentucky?
Today, there are so many people doing so many things with the Internet, it is impossible for anyone to keep up. Even in a relatively small subject area there are likely to be hundreds (if not thousands) of newsgroups, websites, forums, discussion groups, collaborations, blogs, wikis, and web rings -- with new ones coming online every day and old ones dying off almost as fast.
After you find the 100 best "Shaker quilting" websites, how do you keep up with all the changes made by their owners and users?
It is great to have the Internet available to everyone, 24 by 7. The world is changing because of it. But somehow, to be useful, you need to be able to carve out the parts of the Internet that best suit your interests, and make them work for you. You need to be able to say, "I am interested in this, but not that," and have the Internet help you manage the overload.
How many hours a day do you have to spend "surfing the net," looking at page after page, just to keep up with what's happening in Shaker quilting? And what about your other interests?
The more people, organizations and businesses "get on the net," the greater the overload. The Internet as a solution becomes the Internet as a problem. But these problems mean opportunities to help people use the Internet more productively.
Instead of the Internet as "the worldwide web," you want it to be a "personal web," that helps you solve your problems.
ContentsWe live in an age of mass culture, with mass advertising and mass media shouting at us from every angle. Even if you take the trouble to develop educated opinions about the areas that interest you -- politics, religion, science, sports, hobbies, etc. -- it has become increasingly difficult to make your voice heard over the din.
You have always been able to write letters to the editor of a magazine or newspaper, but there was no guarantee the editor would publish them. Editors have to be selective because of space and audience interest constraints. Now, though, there are many more mass media channels (newspapers, magazines, radio and TV) specializing ever more narrowly, all clamoring for "content" from wherever they can get it, and with much less filtering. The result, however, is more noise; more competing voices shouting to be heard.
But there is something new in the world -- the Internet -- a more powerful two-way channel for communications. Not only can you hear what the mass media is broadcasting, you can talk back in a great many new ways: e-mail, forums, discussion groups, wikis, personal websites, web logs, etc.
Doesn't this just add to the din? Yes it does, but with a difference. Now, it is possible for any individual to establish an unfiltered and persistent voice that can be heard worldwide. Getting anyone to listen, however, is a different problem. To do that you need to become part of a community.
The Internet is a sphere, all users and resources are points on the surface with universal connectivity among any two points. Communities of unlimited size, complexity and durability form as those connections develop and evaporate. To be effective in these communities, you need to establish a presence that other people recognize and respect, and that presence has to be both attractive and persistent.
ContentsLots of people have vanity pages in their ISP's server: usually just a few pages of pictures and links hardly anyone ever looks at, ever links to, or ever goes back to. But some people work hard to establish a meaningful Internet identity. They build their own website or weblog, keeping in mind three important goals: make it easy to find, make it attractive, and make it sticky.
Whether you have your own website or blog, or just comment on those of others, people come to recognize your name, and hopefully respect your opinions. Your goals, now, are the inverse of someone who builds a personal website: finding good websites, evaluating them, and keeping up with them.
If you really want a strong presence on the Internet, you have to do all of the above. You have to create a quality website of your own, and you have to find, evaluate and keep up with many other websites. For all of this, you need tools - good tools like BottomFeeder!
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You can skip this chapter if you are more interested in how to do specific BottomFeeder tasks. You do not have to understand how BottomFeeder works in any great detail -- no more than the driver of a car needs to know how its engine works -- but you may find it helpful to understand a few basic concepts.
The most basic concept is object orientation -- also called action on an object. BottomFeeder is all about objects and commands to those objects. Folders, Favorites, Feedlists, Feeds and Items are the kinds of objects you see in BottomFeeder. (More about them in the following sections.) Icons and text in BottomFeeder's windows represent each kind of object, so you always know what you are seeing.
But objects are more than just pretty pictures. Each object responds to your commands. All you have to do is select an object and choose a command to send it. The main trick is knowing what kind of object to select to do what you want, but that will become clear when you know a bit more about each kind of object. Sending a command to an object is then just a matter of selecting an option in the Main Window menu, in the Main Window Toolbar, or in the popup menus of each of the window panes.
The really cool thing (if you're into tech stuff) is that BottomFeeder is itself made up of objects that send commands to each other. So there is a direct relation between your commands and the way that BottomFeeder performs those commands. But that's the beauty of programming in Smalltalk!
ContentsA feed is an object that represents a special kind of file in a website; one that specifies what has changed in the other files of the website. It is called a feed because it supplies, or feeds, information to whomever will consume it. The website does not have to send messages to individual subscribers to tell them about changes. It just updates its feed file. Anyone on the web can then ask for a copy of the feed file.
BottomFeeder does not care how a website creates a feed file and adds new items to it. In some cases, the website accumulates items in a change log, and on a periodic basis builds a new feed file, and replaces its old feed file. An alternative is for a website to update its feed file every time there is a new item. As a consumer of feed files, you really do not care.
BottomFeeder is a program that aggregates -- a fancy word for "brings together" -- feeds from multiple websites. You tell BottomFeeder what feeds you are interested in by subscribing to them. BottomFeeder then checks for changes by getting the feed file, and telling you about each change. Just leave BottomFeeder running in the background; it checks for feed updates every N minutes, and let's you know when something is new.
But there's a catch; for BottomFeeder to do its thing, a website must publish a feed. An ever increasing number of websites (over 15,000, now) publish feeds, and it's an idea that is quickly catching on. People tend to revisit sites that provide feeds - and that's a good thing, so more and more sites are coming on board. If you find an interesting website that doesn't publish a feed yet, send the web master a message to "get with the program."
ContentsThe process by which BottomFeeder updates feeds from their source websites is straightforward, and worth a few minutes of time to understand.
A website creates its feed files according to the RSS standard. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. There have been several versions of this standard, with many differences among them as people have tried to make RSS feeds handle different things. As a user of BottomFeeder, you do not have to be concerned with this; BottomFeeder handles all of the common standards just fine, including:
Here's an example of a minimal RSS 0.91 feed (taken from a RSS Tutorial):
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="0.91">
<channel>
<title>Example Channel</title>
<link>http://example.com/</link>
<description>My example channel</description>
</channel>
<item>
<title>News for September the Second</title>
<link>http://example.com/2002/09/01</link>
<description>other things happened today</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>News for September the First</title>
<link>http://example.com/2002/09/02</link>
</item>
</rss>
Without going into all of its details, this is an XML encoded file consisting of tagged elements. The root element, <rss>
to </rss>
, encloses all other elements. Its first element is <channel>
, which specifies the title, link and description of the feed's source website. This is followed by a series of <item>
elements, each of which specifies the title, link and description of some aspect of the source website that is new or changed. If the website covers multiple topics, it may produce multiple feeds so that users can select which ones they want to monitor.
A feedlist is a specially formatted file that contains the names and addresses of feeds. It is a convenient way to send information about some feeds to aggregator like BottomFeeder.
A feedlist does not contain feeds, themselves; only their names and addresses. BottomFeeder keeps feedlists in a separate folder tree under a root folder called Feedlists.
ContentsA syndicator is a website that publishes directories of Feeds published by other websites. Many syndicators help you to create a personal directory of feeds, called a feedlist, a kind of feed about feeds.
If you subscribe to a category in a syndicator, every time you ask for an update of your personal feedlist, you get an updated list of the feeds in that category. This is a good way to keep up with any new websites coming online that you might find interesting.
ContentsBottomFeeder isn't a syndicator, but it does have a limited facility for producing feedlists. You can export a feedlist containing entries for each of the feeds in your Subscriptions folder. BottomFeeder writes this feedlist to a file on your local disk. You can then send is as an email attachment to other users. BottomFeeder can then also import the feeds identified by a feedlist (but not the feedlist itself in this version).
ContentsFeedlists are a type of XML file whose elements are defined by one of the following standards. BottomFeeder can read them all.
Here's an example of an OPML feedlist file exported by BottomFeeder:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<opml version="1.0">
<head>
<title>BottomFeeder OPML Export</title>
<dateCreated>Thu, 21 Aug 2003 11:37:29 GMT</dateCreated>
</head>
<body>
<outline
description="Cincom Product Manager"
htmlUrl="http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml"
language="en"
text="Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants"
xmlUrl="http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView"/>
<outline description="Cincom Smalltalk Developer's Wiki"
htmlUrl="http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssWiki/rssWiki.xml"
language="en-us"
text="CincomSmalltalkWiki"
xmlUrl="http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/CincomSmalltalkWiki"/>
</body>
</opml>
Each <outline.../>
element describes a feed in the feedlist.
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It is one thing to understand the objects and commands of a program, it is quite another to know how to use its facilities in the most effective way. This section discusses various tasks you may want to accomplish using BottomFeeder, and gives you hints on how to perform them.
ContentsAssume for a moment that you are participating in three different virtual communities: Computer Programming, Science Fiction, and Origami. You regularly interact with half a dozen websites in each community, all of which publish feeds. You probably don't want to put all of these feeds into a single big list; instead, you want to keep them in separate groups. This makes it easier to keep track of what is happening in each topic.
BottomFeeder helps you to organize your feeds in folders, similar to the file folders on your personal computer. It provides a root folder, called Subscriptions in which you organize your feeds. You can also create your own topical folders under Subscriptions to categorize feeds even finer, in a hierarchy of folders. For example, you could have folders organized like this, each with zero or more feeds:
¦ Subscriptions folderBottomFeeder provides facilities for working with
To create a tree of folders, select a folder and the Add folder
command in its pop-up menu. BottomFeeder prompts you for the name of the new folder. If you later decide it should have a different name, choose the Rename folder
command. To get rid of a folder (and everything in it!) choose the Remove folder
command. You can also move a folder (and everything in it) from the folder that contains it to a different folder by using drag-and-drop.
Select a folder in the Subscriptions tree and the Add Feed...
command. The Add Feed
prompt asks you for a "URL," the Internet address of the feed. If you know a feed's URL, you can just type it or copy it into the prompt, but this leads to some more general questions:
Items are contained in feeds, not folders, but a folder knows about all the feeds it contains (directly and in lower level folders). If you want to see all the items in a folder, just select the folder. The result is a list of all items in the feeds of the selected folder.
ContentsIf all of the items of a feed are old, then BottomFeeder identifies the feed as being old; and if a feed contains any new items, then BottomFeeder identifies the feed as being new. There are times, when you want all feeds of a folder to be either old or new. Select the folder and the Mark all feeds as new
command or the Mark all feeds as old
command. BottomFeeder goes into each feed and marks all contained items as old or new, making the feeds old or new.
Folders know about the objects in their group, so if you want BottomFeeder to update all of the feeds in a folder, select the folder and the Update all feeds
command. It then tells each feed to update itself, the same as if you individually told each feed to update itself. Cool, but folders also contain other folders, which may themselves have feeds. No problem, your command to a folder to update its feeds propagates on down to the lowest contained feed.
Finding the feed of a website is usually easy -- if it has one. The website tells you in one of these ways:
Some webpages have a simple statement such as
Feed at: http://xxx/xxx.rss
Copy the URL (the http://xxx/xxx.rss
) and paste it into a BottomFeeder Add Feed
prompt.
Techy websites sometimes refer to feeds as "RSS feeds" or just as "RSS" or "XML".
Some webpages use a special kind of link that you can click to have their feed added to your aggregator. These links look like other links with the link title underlined, but the link title says something like "my feed."
Select File / Register as Default Aggregator
in the BottomFeeder menu. This tells BottomFeeder program to add a special program to the Windows registry.
Other times, you see this button in webpages
Click this button and a new browser is opened on the feed itself - in all of its RSS and XML glory. Ignore everything but the URL of the feed file in the Address
field of the browser. Copy this URL and paste it into a BottomFeeder Add Feed
prompt.
Fancier yet, you may see this button:
Click this button and your browser passes the URL of the website's feed to BottomFeeder, which puts the new feed in the root Subscriptions folder. You can move it to a different folder if you want. Of course, BottomFeeder has to be running on your computer at the same time as the browser.
Not every website knows about BottomFeeder, but you may see one of these buttons:
If you are running BottomFeeder instead of one of these programs, click the button anyway. It does not matter which one you click; the URL always goes to BottomFeeder. (No, this is not piracy! Very few websites support more than one Feed Button, and you are not likely to be running more than one Feed Browser.)
For this to work, make sure Run Server Interfaces Compatible With Other Tools
is checked in the BottomFeeder Settings Window.
One more button you may see is this one
Click it and your browser takes you to a special website where a variety of Feed Browsers are registered. There, you will see some of the buttons already discussed, plus others for additional Feed Browser programs. Click the button for the Feed Browser running in your computer, such as BottomFeeder, and a subscription to the Feed is added to that program. (Here too, BottomFeeder accepts requests to any of the programs.)
Another method, which is really only intended for use by programs (such as syndicators, browsers, and search engines) is to look in the source file of a website's main page. Select the View / Source
command in your browser's main menu. This gets you a display of the HTML source file of the page. Then look for something like the following within the <head></head> element near the top of the file:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="url/to/rss/file"/>
The value of the "href" parameter is the URL of the site's feed. Can't find it? Too bad -- a lot of websites aren't doing this yet.
You can also get your browser to look in a web page you are viewing for a link to a feed.
Drag the following link (from this document) to your browser's Links
toolbar:
You may have to persuade your browser to show its "Links" toolbar. If you are using Windows Internet Explorer, keep selecting the View / Toolbars / Links
command until it shows up.
When you are looking at a webpage, select this link from your Links
toolbar. If there is a feed present, it is added to the BottomFeeder Subscriptions folder. You can then move it to a different folder if you want.
It is one thing to find the feed of a website you are browsing, quite another to find interesting websites with feeds. Some times you need to find websites of interest, and then determine if they have a feed. Other times you need to find feeds, and then determine if their websites are really of interest. BottomFeeder helps you do both.
ContentsOne of the ways people find new things on the web is by following links from webpage to webpage. Use your regular Internet Browser to find interesting websites. Click on links in webpages to go from website to website, "surfing" your way through the Internet. Your browser's Favorites or Bookmarks feature helps you save links to the sites you like.
BottomFeeder provides limited support for surfing. Although it is not a full-function browser, BottomFeeder attempts to present new pages in the Item Pane. Alternatively, you can have BottomFeeder launch an external browser for linked pages, which gives you the full function of the external browser.
ContentsWhen you browse feeds in BottomFeeder, you see many links to webpages related to individual items. Following these links often leads to websites of interest.
Browse Feed Link
command. The website may have additional feeds for other categories of information.Browse
command or one of the Launch
commands. A common practice of people who publish a blog is to include a Blog Role, a list of links to other blogs and websites that they find interesting. In this way, an implicit community of blogs develops through references to each other. The links in a blog role are, in effect, recommendations of other websites worth looking at.
ContentsA feed was described in the Technical Concepts section as a file periodically generated by a website that identifies the changes that have occurred in the website. A broader view is that a feed is a file that contains links to a set of related items; for example, the results of performing a search. The generation of this kind of pseudo-feed file is on-demand, rather than periodic, but BottomFeeder presents its items the same as any other feed.
In fact, BottomFeeder helps you to build a variety of pseudo-feeds. When you select one of the Search / xxx feed builder...
options, BottomFeeder asks a search engine to return the results of the search as a feed file.
As needed, you can select the feed and use the Update feed
command. BottomFeeder then asks the search engine to create a new feed for the same query string.
Amazon
is a commercial website that catalogs and sells a wide variety of books and other media. The Search / Amazon feed builder...
command opens a Amazon Feed Builder
window, in which you can identify the feed you want from Amazon; for example, a feed on all books related to a specific subject. BottomFeeder adds the new feed to the currently selected Subscriptions folder, or to the Subscriptions Folder itself.
To use BlogDigger as a feed builder, select Search / BlogDigger feed builder...
. BottomFeeder opens a dialog in which you can specify a query string to send to BlogDigger. Google returns a feed of items containing the query string, from the various blogs that it searched. BottomFeeder adds the new feed to the currently selected Subscriptions folder, or to the Subscriptions Folder itself.
BottomFeeder maintains a local copy on your system of all of the items of all of the feeds that it has read (that have not yet been replaced by newer items). You can search these items and build a feed of the results.
To use BottomFeeder as a feed builder, select a folder in the Searches tree and the Add search
command. BottomFeeder opens a dialog in which you can specify a query string. It returns a feed of items containing the query string, from the various items that it searched. BottomFeeder adds the new feed to the currently selected Searches folder.
To use Feedster as a feed builder, select Search / Feedster feed builder...
. BottomFeeder opens a dialog in which you can specify a query string to send to Feedster. Feedster returns a feed of items containing the query string, from the various feeds that it searched. BottomFeeder adds the new feed to the currently selected Subscriptions folder, or to the Subscriptions Folder itself.
To use Google as a feed builder, select Search / Google feed builder...
. BottomFeeder opens a dialog in which you can specify a query string to send to Google. Google returns a feed of items containing the query string, from the various webpages that it searched. BottomFeeder adds the new feed to the currently selected Subscriptions folder, or to the Subscriptions Folder itself.
This is similar to the Feedster Feed Builder. Select Search / Headline News feed builder...
. BottomFeeder opens a dialog in which you can specify a query string to send to the Headline News, Yahoo or NewsTrove service. The returned feed consists of items containing the query string, from the various feeds it searched. BottomFeeder adds the new feed to the currently selected Subscriptions folder, or to the Subscriptions Folder itself.
Syndic8 is a type of website called a "syndicator." Other websites register the feeds they produce with Syndic8, which then obtains updates to those feeds on a regular basis. A program like BottomFeeder can submit queries to Syndic8 to obtain a list of feeds that contain information that matches a query string. BottomFeeder presents the list of feeds that contained the query string, and you can select the feeds you want to add to a folder.
Search / Feed Auto-Discovery
command from the main menu, BottomFeeder creates a new folder for the feeds in the Subscriptions root folder. The name of the new folder is derived from the search string. Discover feeds
command. BottomFeeder then adds the new feeds to that folder.Over time, some of the feeds you acquire may need some amount of attention. Select a feed and one of the following commands:
Mark Feed Inactive
tells BottomFeeder to stop updating the feed from its website. BottomFeeder also changes the color of the feed's icon to black.Mark Feed Active
tells BottomFeeder to restart the automatic updating of an inactive feed from its website. BottomFeeder immediately gets an update and changes the color of the feed's icon to red.Update Feed
tells BottomFeeder to update the feed from the feed's website. This updates the list of items BottomFeeder has saved for the feed. BottomFeeder automatically updates subscribed feeds, but you can update a feed whenever you want.Remove Feed
deletes the feed from the containing folder. Careful with this command; BottomFeeder deletes all items saved for the feed.Regenerate Feed
removes the feed and rebuilds it from the website's feed file. BottomFeeder deletes all items saved for the feed before it gets new items from the website's feed file.Report feed error to author
opens a New Message window addressed to the provider of the feed so that you can report an error in the feed.Additional information is available about each feed and its website. Select the feed and one of the following commands:
Browse Feed Link
opens a browser on a page of the website specified by the feed, usual the website's home page.Feed Properties
opens the Feed Properties window which has two tabs:
Browse Feed Source
opens a browser on the feed's RSS file, with full RSS markup tags. Map It
opens a browser on the Acme Mapper website with the geographical coordinates specified by the feed's website. The displayed webpage shows a satellite image that locates the coordinates. You can then zoom in or out and move the starting point to explore the area. This command is available only for feeds that provide geographical coordinates.Some feeds allow you to provide them with comments, or to enter a query for their website. Select the feed and the Send comment on feed
command. BottomFeeder then opens the Feed Comments window in which you can enter a comment or a query. If the website returns results from a query, BottomFeeder presents them in the Item pane.
To comment on an item of a feed, select the item and use the Send comment on item
command.
The easiest way to view the active items in a feed is to simply select the feed in the Tree pane. Active items are those that have not been filtered out and that you have not deleted. Inactive items are hidden until replaced by new items when the feed is updated or regenerated. Until then, hidden items can still be viewed by selecting the View hidden items
command.
You may not be interested in seeing some of the items that appear in a feed. For example, a blogger may include sports or rock music items interesting to him or her but boring to you. To eliminate these items when they arrive, select the Search / Define Global Filters
command in the main menu or the Define Filters
command of a selected feed. BottomFeeder applies global filters to all items of all feeds, but it selectively applies a feed's filters to just that feed.
You can define multiple global or feed-specific filters. BottomFeeder filters out items that have a specific word or phrase in their category, title or contents. You can also tell BottomFeeder to filter out all old items in a feed.
ContentsYou can ask BottomFeeder to alert you whenever there are new items in a subscribed feed. Select the feed and the Add Feed Notifier
command. BottomFeeder adds a bell icon to the feed's icon so you can see which feeds have notifiers. When you no longer want a notifier on a feed, select the feed and the Remove Feed Notifier
command.
When new items arrive in any of your subscribed feeds, BottomFeeder adds them to the New Items list and enables the New Items
tool button. BottomFeeder also adds the new items in feeds with notifiers to its Alert list and enables the Alerts
tool button. In effect, you are alerted whenever new items show up in any subscribed feed.
So when should you add a notifier to a feed? One answer is to use notifiers for only those feeds you want to track closely.
Each item is represented by only one Item object. An item exists only in its containing feed, but it can also appear in other lists, such as the New Items list or a list of items found by a search. Anything you do to an item in any list, such as marking it as old, affects the item in its feed and in all other lists.
ContentsWhenever a feed is updated from its website, either by subscription or on demand, BottomFeeder checks to see if there are any new items. If there are, it displays the title of the new items in red text. Click a new item and BottomFeeder assumes it is now an old item, and displays its title in black text. This distinction between old and new items has one more visual effect. If all items of a feed are old, the feed's icon in the tree is blue; if any items are new, the feed's icon is red.
There are times, however, when you want BottomFeeder to treat the items of a feed as either all old or all new. Select the feed and the Mark all feed items as new
command or the Mark all feed items as old
command.
When you are working with a list of items, you can delete individual items from the containing feed. BottomFeeder does not actually remove the item until it needs space for a new item; it just marks it as deleted and does not show it in any item lists. Until the time when it is actually removed, a deleted item can be restored to the feed. Select the feed and the View hidden items
command. BottomFeeder shows you a list of the deleted (and filtered) items in the feed. You can review them and individually restore deleted items to the feed. Alternatively, you can select the feed and the Restore all deleted items
command.
Items that have been filtered out of a feed also appear in the display of hidden items. However, they cannot be restored in the same way as a deleted item because they would just be filtered out again at the next update of the feed. Instead, to permanently restore filtered items, use the Define Filters
to change the feed's filters.
When you select a feed, BottomFeeder displays either a list of its items, or a convenient, scrollable newspaper view of the items. The list view provides many commands for working with items that are not available in the newspaper view.
ContentsIf you are using the list view of items, BottomFeeder displays a table with the date, title and category of each item in the Item List
pane. You can sort items by date, title or category. BottomFeeder tells you which items are old and which are new. Clicking on a new item makes it old, but you can make any item new again, or you can make all items either old or new.
Click an item, and BottomFeeder shows you its contents in the Item
pane. This is whatever the publisher of the feed wants it to be. It may be text that describes a change to a website page, it may be a copy of the change, or it may be a link to a changed page in the website. It just depends on what the website put into the item.
Item
pane. Auto-browse Empty Descriptions
setting is checked, it displays the referenced page in the Item
pane; otherwise, it displays the URL of the link in the Item
pane (which you can click to open a browser on that page).Item
pane. To view the referenced page, right-click the item in the Item List
pane to get its popup menu. You can then use one of the following commands:
Browse Item in BottomFeeder
- the webpage is displayed in the Item
pane.Launch New Browser on Item
- a new browser window is opened on the webpage.Launch Browser on Item
- if there is an existing browser window open, it is used to show the webpage; otherwise a new browser is opened. This only works on Windows.Item List
pane is the same as launching a new browser on the item.If you are using the newspaper view of items, BottomFeeder displays items as scrollable pages of items. To obtain a newspaper view, check the appropriate settings in the BottomFeeder Settings
window or in the Settings
tab of a Feed Properties
window.
Every item has a link (URL) back to its source file in a website, and this is often used to make a reference from one item to a different item in the same or in a different feed. These references appear in the text of the referencing item as normal web page links. As people write blog items and as they comment on each other's items, complex networks of such links often get created. It can be useful to find out what links other people have made to an item you are viewing, especially when you subscribe to many feeds on a single topic.
When BottomFeeder updates a feed it looks for links in all new items and comments and keeps a record of them. Later, to determine if an item you select in the Item List
has any related items, get its popup menu and see if the View related items
option is enabled. If it is and you select that option, BottomFeeder shows all related items in the Item List
. Note, however, that only items that BottomFeeder has already saved in your local system are shown. For broader searches of the Internet, use one of BottomFeeder's many search facilities.
If you are subscribed to a large number of feeds that have lots of items and comments, you may not want BottomFeeder to cross reference related items. To turn off this feature, go to the Feeds
tab in the BottomFeeder Settings
and uncheck the Do item cross referencing?
check box.
Displaying items in the Item
pane works fine for small items, but for larger ones, it is too constraining. BottomFeeder has a simple solution. Select the Toggle Zoom
command, and BottomFeeder uses the entire window to the right of the Tree
pane to show the item. You can toggle back to the normal view in the same way. For even more room, you can drag the right side of the Tree
pane to the left, and you can maximize the window in the desktop.
If you are using an Item List view, which has no Tree
pane, the Item
pane uses the entire view area of the Main window.
While in zoom mode, you can use keyboard shortcuts (Up arrow, Down arrow, Page Up, Page down, Ctrl-Home and Ctrl-End) to go from item to item. This gives you an alternate way to use BottomFeeder.
For convenience, the popup menus of both the Item List
pane and the Item
pane have most of the same commands for working with items.
Whenever a feed is updated from its website, BottomFeeder checks if there are any new items. If there are, it displays the title of the new items in red text. Click a new item and BottomFeeder assumes it is now an old item, and displays its title in black text.
You can make any old item new again by selecting the item and clicking the Mark item as new
command. BottomFeeder then changes its title back to red text.
As a convenience, you can mark all the items in an Item List as old or new by clicking any item in the list and clicking the Mark all items as old
command or Mark all items as old
command. This violates the "action on an object" metaphor, but it is a convenience.
Old items normally disappear when new items need their space. But sometimes, you may decide you never need to see an item again, so it can be deleted from the feed right away. Select the item and the click the Delete item from feed
command. BottomFeeder marks the item as deleted so that it will not show it to you again. However, the item continues to be saved until it is replaced by a new item. Until then, you can ask the feed to restore a deleted item, either individually or all deleted items in the feed.
Sometimes there is an item that you want to keep indefinitely. Select the item and click the Make item persistent
command. BottomFeeder marks the item as one to keep and displays its title in italics. If at a later time you decide you no longer want the item, select the item and click the Let item expire
command.
When you first read an item you may decide that you want to be easily able to come back to it at a later time. Select the item in the Item List
pane and the Flag for Follow up
command. Alternatively, select the Toggle flagging
command in the Item
pane. BottomFeeder marks the item as flagged by changing the color of its text to green.
When you want to look at your flagged items, select the Flagged
view button and BottomFeeder will display a list of all flagged items.
To unflag an item, select the item in an Item List
pane and the Unflag item
command. Alternatively, select the Toggle flagging
command in the Item
pane.
Additional information is available about each item. Select the item and click the Item properties
command. BottomFeeder open the Item Properties
window which has two tabs:
Some feeds allow you to comment on their items. Select the item and the Send comment on item
command. BottomFeeder then opens the Item Comments
window in which you can enter a comment.
This is particularly useful for commenting on blog entries.
ContentsJust as you can comment on the items of a feed, so can other people. In some cases, the original item becomes just the starting point for an extended discussion among the writer of the original item and one or more commentators.
If the owner of a feed makes comments available to viewers of his website, they are usually added to the original items in the website's feed, either as links (URL's) or as text. The next time BottomFeeder gets an update of the feed, it also gets any new comments. To see the comments, select the item and scroll to the bottom of Item
pane.
To help you see what items have new comments, BottomFeeder marks the items containing new comments as being new items, which also marks the containing feed as having new items. If you don't want to be informed of new comments in this way, go to the User Interface
tab in the BottomFeeder Settings
and uncheck the Items new if new comments?
check box.
As mentioned above, some websites only provide links (URL's) to comments on items. Click on such a link in the Item
pane and BottomFeeder gets the comment from the website and displays it in the Item
pane. But this really isn't very convenient for you, especially if there are a series of comments on an item; so instead, when BottomFeeder finds a comment link in a feed it automatically goes to the website, gets the comment, and appends the text of the comment to its saved copy of the item. Of course, it only has to do this once for each comment.
If you are subscribed to a large number of feeds that have lots of comments, you may not want BottomFeeder to automatically get copies of all comments. To turn off this feature, go to the Feeds
tab in the BottomFeeder Settings
and uncheck the Aggregate comments with feeds?
check box.
The Internet is all about communicating with other people. Sometimes when you see an item of interest, you may want to tell someone else about it. BottomFeeder gives you three ways; select the item and click on one of these commands:
Print item
-- which formats the item as a printed page and sends it to your printer. You then have all the advantages of the "sneaker net" at your disposal. Send item as e-mail
-- which formats the item as an e-mail message in a New Message window. You can then edit the message any way you want, and send it on to whomever you want.Save to file
-- which copies the item to a new file in your system. You can then handle it as any other file.Blog it!
-- which opens the Blog Posting
window (if you have this plug-in installed) with a reference to the item that you can comment on in you blog.One of the simplest ways in which application programs cooperate is by making it possible to copy information into and out of the system clipboard. BottomFeeder enables information to be copied from items in the following ways:
Item List
pane, you can copy the title of an item by selecting the item and clicking the Copy item title
command.Item List
pane, you can copy the item's link to a webpage by selecting the item and clicking the Copy item link
command.Item
pane, you can copy text by highlighting it and clicking the Copy selected text
command. (You can also use the common Ctrl-C and Ctrl-X keyboard shortcuts.)Item
pane, you can copy a link within the text of the item by placing the mouse over the link and clicking the Copy selected link
command.Item
pane, you can copy an entire table from within an item by placing the mouse in the table and clicking the Export table
command. The table does not, however, go into the clipboard; it is written to a file on your local disk.Finding websites and feeds are important things you do in using the Internet, but you may also want to find items within feeds, either saved by BottomFeeder or out in the Internet.
ContentsTo find an item in one of the feeds in your local BottomFeeder cache, select the Search / Search BottomFeeder...
command. BottomFeeder uses your query string to search its cache. The results are displayed in the Item List
pane.
BlogDigger
is a website that indexes blogs that it finds throughout the Internet. The Search / Do search engine search...
command opens a Search
window, in which you can submit a query to BlogDigger. The results returned by BlogDigger are displayed in a browser window.
For more advanced searches, and for other BlogDigger services, you still have to go the the BlogDigger website.
ContentsFeedster
is a website that indexes feeds that it finds throughout the Internet. The Search / Do search engine search...
command opens a Search
window, in which you can submit a query to Feedster. Popup menus in the Item List
pane and Item
pane also provide shortcuts to the Search tool. BottomFeeder takes the title of an item (or any text selected in the Item
pane) as the query string, but you can edit the query string before requesting a Feedster search. The results returned by Feedster are displayed in the Item
pane, with links to the feeds found. To copy the URL of a feed, position the cursor on the "RSS" link and select the Copy link
command.
For more advanced searches, and for other Feedster services, you still have to go the the Feedster website.
ContentsThe massive indexes and powerful search engines of the Google website make it an invaluable aid for finding websites. The Search / Do search engine search...
command opens a Search
window, in which you can submit a query to Google. Popup menus in the Item List
pane and Item
pane also provide shortcuts to the Search
window. BottomFeeder takes the title of an item (or any text selected in the Item
pane) as the query string, but you can edit the query string before requesting a Google search. The results returned by Google are displayed in the Item
pane, with links to the webpages found.
For more advanced searches, and for other Google services, you still have to go the Google website.
ContentsLike a folder, a feedlist object can be opened to see its feeds; or closed to hide them. The feeds in a feedlist are not automatically read or updated. That happens only when you click the feed. The same goes for feedlists; if you want to update a feedlist, click it and BottomFeeder gets a refreshed feedlist from its syndicator.
You cannot add feeds to a feedlist, or remove them from a feedlist, or move them between feedlists or folders. However, you can select the Subscribe to feed
command, or drag and drop it on a folder in the Subscriptions tree. The feed stays in the feedlist, but also appears in the subscriptions tree. It is then automatically updated the same as any other subscribed feed.
To add a feedlist to the Feedlist tree, select one of its folders and choose the Add feedlist
command. BottomFeeder asks you for the the address (URL) of the feedlist, reads it, and then adds a corresponding feedlist object to the folder.
Get feedlists from the Syndic8 website. Go there and establish a personal account, and then use its search facilities to create a list of the feeds and categories of feeds in which you have an interest. As new feeds are registered in those categories (or deleted), Syndic8 keeps your feedlist up to date. Syndic8 will tell you the address of your personal feedlist to use.
ContentsAdditional information is available about each feedlist. Select the feedlist and click the Feedlist properties
command. BottomFeeder opens the Feedlist Properties
window which lists the properties common to all feedlists.
Using BottomFeeder, you can do some of the things that you normally do with your Internet browser. It is not a full function browser, but it is enough of a browser to help you find and use websites and feeds.
First of all, you can open browsers on feed items, on web pages linked by a feed item, on the home page of a feed's website, and on information about BottomFeeder. You can also use Favorite or Bookmark links from your default browser, and you can open browsers on web pages you find by doing Google and Feedster searches through the BottomFeeder search tool. These features are available through the Browse
and Search
menus of the Main window.
BottomFeeder is a very flexible program. You can tailor its operation to your preferences in many ways. The most basic way is to set values in its initialization (.ini
) file before you start the program. This file is shipped with BottomFeeder to give it default values for these preferences. You too can change these values but it is better to use the Settings Window
when BottomFeeder is running.
Select the System / Settings
command of the main menu, and BottomFeeder opens the Settings Window
. This window displays the current settings in tabbed pages. Select a tab, and make any changes you need.
For good performance, BottomFeeder works with folders, feeds and feedlists as objects in your computer's memory. When you exit from BottomFeeder, it writes all of these objects out to the hard disk so that they will be available when you next start the program. While it is running, more objects are added to memory as feeds are updated. Changes to memory also occur when you create, rename, or move objects. In these ways, the memory objects increasingly differ from what was last written to the hard disk. If your computer crashes (as PC's are all too often known to do), then all of the updates since the last save are lost.
To avoid this, occasionally tell BottomFeeder to save the current state of its memory objects to disk. Click the File / Save All
command on a regular basis, and BottomFeeder saves the current state of all memory objects, along with the current position and size of the Main Window and the current values of the your control settings.
When you quit BottomFeeder, by clicking the File / Exit
command, BottomFeeder checks the shouldSaveFileOnExit
setting. If true, it automatically does a File / Save All
command.
You can also tell BottomFeeder, through the File / Save All To...
command, to save objects in a directory of your choice on your local hard disk. You may want to do this so you can later use File / Restore All
command to restore that aspect of BottomFeeder to a specific state, or so you can share it with another user.
It is also possible to save feeds, feedlists or settings to a network file, and to restore them from a network file server. Request these actions through the Network
menu.
If you use more than one computer system, perhaps a desktop system and a laptop, you may want to have BottomFeeder running on all of them. That way, you can be kept up-to-date regardless of what system you happen to be using. Ideally, you would like to have them all show the same feeds at the same update level, but this doesn't happen automatically.
For example, if your desktop system is continually connected to the Internet, BottomFeeder updates all feeds automatically; but your laptop system may be connected only when you are actually using it. When you start BottomFeeder on the laptop system, its feeds are also updated, but not the records that BottomFeeder keeps on the desktop system about which items have been read, deleted, filtered or made persistent. Nor does the laptop BottomFeeder know about any feeds, folders, or filters added or removed from the desktop system.
To bring your laptop BottomFeeder to the same update level as your desktop BottomFeeder, you need to synchronize them. There are two ways to do this, through a network connection, or through saved and loaded synchronization files.
System/Synchronize
command in one of them. BottomFeeder prompts you for the name of the server with which you want to synchronize. For example, if you want to synchronize your laptop BottomFeeder with your desktop system, select the System/Synchronize
command in you laptop BottomFeeder and specify the server address of the desktop system on which BottomFeeder is currently running.
Specify just the name or IP address of the server (for example, server.domain.com
); not a full URL (for example, http://server.domain.com/...
).
System/Save Synchronize File
command in the BottomFeeder system with which you want the other systems to synchronize; for example, the desktop system. If you save this file to a portable media (such as a CD-ROM), you can then use your sneaker-net to take it to the other systems.System/Load Synchronize File
command in the BottomFeeder system to be synchronized, and specify the name of the previously saved synchronization file.A stylesheet is a description of how the elements of a document are to be presented in a specified media. A magazine, for example, has roughly the same appearance from month to month, even though its contents changes. This is because the writers and editors all work as required by a predefined stylesheet. It tells them, for example, to use a certain typeface of a certain size for titles. The same for BottomFeeder; the items of the subscribed feeds change, but the way BottomFeeder presents them remains consistent because of a stylesheet.
BottomFeeder is initially installed with more than a dozen different stylesheets, and you can select the one you want, to obtain the presentation style that best suits your needs. The Stylesheets
menu in the main window is a list of named stylesheets that you can select.
The stylesheets BottomFeeder uses are defined according to a standard Internet language called Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS for short. If you like to try new things, you can also create your own custom stylesheets. You may find it helpful to obtain one of the many books published about CSS.
The stylesheets
directory in your BottomFeeder home directory contains the named stylesheets that are installed with BottomFeeder. Copy one of these stylesheets (with a new name) into the same directory, and try changing some of its specifications. When you restart BottomFeeder, you will find the name of your custom stylesheet in the Stylesheets
menu.
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