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.