14 Aug
After writing my last post I remembered that I’d done up a send-to option for FeedDemon itself too. It’s pretty simple just download this XML file and save it to the c:\Program Files\FeedDemon\Data\SendTo\ folder. Restart FeedDemon and you can then use the Send To option to clip an item to Evernote. Same as the Google Reader version, this will clip the whole page that the news item is from, not just the news feed item, and it will open up a page that will let you tag or move the clipped item.
Unfortunately at this point there’s no way to set the icon next to custom Send To items (that I’m aware of anyway)
6 Apr
Nick Bradbury has just released the latest beta version of his great RSS reader FeedDemon. With the new update comes a bunch of new items & so that means that my old localisation file is now out of date.
Since I got to play with a pre-release version (thanks Nick!) I had a chance to update the language file that comes with version 3 to replace Synchronize with Synchronise, Color with Colour and so on. So if you like your colourful language, you can grab the file here after downloading FeedDemon. To install the file either click on the link to the language file while browsing in FeedDemon, or download the file & copy it to C:Program FilesFeedDemonDatalang (Assuming you’ve installed FeedDemon there) and then double-click on the file.
One thing to note: in the Tools menu, the ‘Synchronization Options’ menu item uses the ‘z’ as the keyboard shortcut. Because ‘Open FeedStation’ already uses the s, I’ve make the ‘Synchronisation Options’ use the ‘y’ as the shortcut letter.
Any mistakes or missed words please let me know! There is a topic on the NewsGator localisation forums for this language file too.
2 Apr
As Amit Agarwal pointed out in his (very detailed) post, the new FeedDemon is a great Twitter client, with a whole bunch of features to make using Twitter easier.
One thing that a lot of people don’t know is that FeedDemon’s newspaper layout is very customisable, I while I use the Surfer theme usually, I found that for Twitter feeds it was very annoying. Showing the title is useless because the body of the post is the title, also, the large spacing around each post just used up a lot of space and meant I had to keep scrolling a lot to read the feed. Also, the thumbnails view is pretty useless for a Twitter feed, seeing as it’s just full of people’s profile pictures
So I took the surfer style & I’ve customised it for a Twitter feed (download here). FeedDemon is great in that it lets you set a custom newspaper style for particular feeds (Feed Properties -> Advanced). The new Twitter style removes the thumbnails, removes the post title unless you’re in headlines only view and trims a lot of the extra whitespace. Also I removed most of the action buttons as I don’t tend to send tweets or clip them (and if I want to, there are keyboard shortcuts) and unfortunately, which buttons show can’t be customised per feed.
Also, you can make your own custom buttons, so I added a Retweet button next to the new Reply button that sends you to Twitter with the retweet filled in ready to send. This was surprisingly simple. The fact that Nick has used standard xslt to style FeedDemon rather than a proprietary format means that you can do pretty much whatever you want to, which is awesome!
So this is what it looks like now
If you want to give this a go, download this file and put it in the c:\Program Files\FeedDemon\Data\Styles folder & restart FeedDemon. Alternatively if you a reading this in FeedDemon you can just click on the download link & it will install it for you. Then change the style for your Twitter feed(s) by right clicking on the feed then going to Feed Properties -> Advanced and pick Twitter from the list of Styles.
This is just a first idea, it probably needs work. I’m debating moving the buttons under each tweet, but I’m not sure. Also I’ve written this for the new FeedDemon 3 Beta. It may well work for earlier versions, but I don’t know. There’s a topic for this style in the Newsgator styles forum where you can leave comments / suggestions, or you can leave a comment here.
Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter here.
24 Jun
Nick Bradbury announced today that shared news aggregator site ReadBurner has added Newsgator (ie FeedDemon) shared items feeds to their site. This means that us FeedDemon users can join all the cool Google Reader kids over there.
Along with including NewsGator feeds, they’ve added NewsGator as a tab up the top of their site along with Google Reader & Netvibes so you can read your feeds without leaving the ReadBurner site. While that’s not a huge feature to me (FeedDemon FTW!) I’m sure it would be handy if you used the Newsgator web interface.
Here’s the instructions from Nick on how you add you Newsgator clipping feed:
Here’s how it’s done:
- If you haven’t done so already, share one of your clippings folders as an RSS feed (this screencast explains how this is done in FeedDemon).
- Copy the URL of the shared clippings feed to the clipboard (in FeedDemon, you can do this by clicking the “Copy” link from the clippings properties).
- Browse to http://www.readburner.com/
- Go to the "Add Feed" option on the right hand side of the ReadBurner menu bar, then select “NewsGator Clippings” and enter the URL of your clipping feed.
Also, as Nick mentioned, FeedDemon allows you to share web pages as well as feed items. Just drag the url into your clippings folder & it will get added (Just the title, the content of the page won’t be added).
This is great, and a great boost for Newsgator & FeedDemon as they get more visibility in the RSS reader market place. Remember kids, FeedDemon, along with the syncing ability of Newsgator is free! You need to download it now.
Update: Here’s my clippings folder on ReadBurner. It’s just showing up as ‘Link Blog’ despite me putting in my alias. Oh well, I’d prefer to have my name there, but at least it’s working! Drew from ReadBurner responded to my issue & has already fixed it, thanks Drew! (see comments below)
16 May
Amit Agarwal from Digital Inspiration has posted that FeedDemon, the best RSS reader ever, has been updated to version 2.7. It’s kind of unexpected as the last version that was announced by Nick Bradbury was the 2.6.1 RC2. Nick has added Amit’s post to his shared clippings folder, but other than that there’s been no ‘official’ announcement. FileForum seems to have gotten the update first, and then the Newsgator download page was hastily updated to the 2.7 version (the page still mentions the 2.6 version, but the download file is for 2.7).
7 Feb
While I’m on the topic of FeedDemon, Nick Bradbury posted a couple of days ago about how to localise the language of FeedDemon. It’s fully customisable using the language xml files in the [FeedDemon Install Folder]/Data/lang/ folder. So in view of that I put together a modification of the default American English language file that changes the spelling of words like ‘colour’ and ’synchronised’ from the American to the Australian (or British) spelling.
If you want to use it grab it from here. If you’re viewing that page in FeedDemon it will install it automatically. If not, just copy the file to the folder above & restart FeedDemon.