Newsfeed Management

4. Managing Newsfeeds

This section will cover Categories and grouping your information.

To access the news ticker display preferences right-click on the ticker bar and click on the Newsfeed Management menu option.

Screenshot of Newsfeed Management: Managing Newsfeeds

1. The Move Selection Buttons

Use the up / down arrow buttons to move your selected Newsfeed up and down within a category or across categories. You use the arrows to sort the order in which your news category appears. In the screenshot above the news ticker will display the categories in the following order:

News
Sports
New Channels

The news channels within each category follow the same principle and as per the above example the RSS news feeds will be displayed in the following order:

CNN Top Stories
CNN Money
CNN Technology

2 & 3. Adding Newsfeeds

To create a new newsfeed first select the category that you would like the newsfeed to belong to. Then:

Click on the green + button or
Right-click in the left-pane of the window to access the news feed menu and click on the "Add Newsfeed" menu item.

Note: Look at the Main Menu page for two additional shortcuts to adding new news feeds.

2 & 4. Deleting Newsfeeds

If you want to unsubscribe from a news feed and delete it permanently then you can:

Select the newsfeed and click on the red X button or
Right-click in the left-pane of the window to access the news feed menu and click on the "Delete Newsfeed" menu item.

Note: There is only one news feed that you can't delete and that is your sponsor's. RSS Advantage depends on sponsors to pay for development and to get this free software out there to as many people as possible. You can see who your sponsor is by boing to Help > About.

In the NewsMaster Edition the option to disable newsfeeds is available and you can disable your sponsor's newsfeed. See point 11.

5 & 9. Renaming A Newsfeed

There are three different ways that you can rename a newsfeed. You can use

The right-click menu option and Rename to edit the selected item inside the tree hierarchy
Select the item that you wish to rename in the tree hierarchy and press "F2" on your keyboard.
Select the item that you wish to rename in the tree hierarchy end edit the "Name" field in the details pane on the right-hand side of the window.

6. The Newsfeed URL

You can use this field to edit the URL of the current news feed.

7. Last Updated

This is the date and time that the news feed was last updated for your information.

8. News Feed Status

This field displays the status of the newsfeed. These are possible status codes that are avaialble:

OK - Everything is good. The software was able to connect and retrieve the latest news from the selected news feed.
Never Connected - This is displayed for new feeds that have just been added
Haven't Connected Today - This news feed currently in the update queue waiting for retrieval
Connect Failed - The newsticker could not connect to the news feed URL
Bad Feed URL - The newsticker managed to connect to the URL but valid news feed was not found.
Bad Newsfeed - The newsticker found a news feed at the URL but the data inside the feed was corrupted.
Unknown Newsfeed Type - The format of the news feed was unrecognizable so the newsticker could not display it.

The RSS Advantage Newsticker is capable of displaying any news feeds that comply to the following three specifications: RDF, RSS and Atom news feeds.

9. Name

As the title implies, you can edit the name of the news feed in this field.

The news feed (or channel name) is displayed in a little pop-up above the tickerbar whenever a new news feed channel display cycle starts.

10. Abbreviation

This field is used to edit the abbreviation on a news feed.

NewsMaster Edition features (Points 11 to 16)

11. Enable / Disable

You can untick the Enable option to temporarily unsubscribe from a news feed without deleting it permanently.

12. Setting the Update Interval

This field allows you to specify how often the newsticker must connect to a news feed to retrieve the latest news. The default setting is to check every hour.

Set the Days, Hours and Minutes to your preference.

For example:

If you are monitoring a major sporting event you will want the newsticker to check the sports channel every five minutes to get the latest scores.

13. Hiding Older Items

Not all sites update their news frequently... some sites may only update their news once a week. There are also sites that leave the last 6 months of news in their news feeds.

With this option you can choose to hide older news items and not have them hogging up your news.

14. Setting The Maximum Number of Items To Display

The maximum is 32 news items per news feed. In other words if the news feed has more than 32 news items in it only the latest 32 items will be displayed in the tickerbar.

You can set this number lower for frequently updating news feeds so that you can get only the latest X items. I once saw one news feed that had 68 items in it and it took forever to get to the next news channel!

15 & 16. Newsfeed Channel Colors

As the name implies, you can set the tickerbar colors for the current news feed.

Text Color - Sets the tickerbar's text color
Background - Sets the tickerbar's background color

Next: The Help Menu