Author: Nick Bradbury

One of FeedDemon’s lesser-known features is its support for Media RSS thumbnails, which are used in a number of RSS feeds, including those from Flickr.  When FeedDemon displays Media RSS feeds, it extracts the thumbnails and shows them in a banner along the top, like this:

Navigating to the full-size photo on Flickr’s site is as simple as clicking one of these thumbnails.

FeedDemon also makes it very simple to subscribe to a Flickr feed for a specific tag.  For example, to subscribe to a feed containing Flickr photos tagged "nature," just follow these steps:

1. Click "Subscribe"
2. Instead of entering a URL, type nature (screenshot)
3. Click Next
4. Select "Flickr Photo" from the list (screenshot)
5. Click Next
6. Choose the folder to add the feed to, then complete the wizard

That’s all there is to it.  Here’s a screenshot of FeedDemon which shows the Flickr feed we just added:

Bonus tip: This also works for YouTube feeds – just select "YouTube Video" instead of "Flickr Photo" in step 4.

When people first use FeedDemon, they often treat their unread articles the same as they do their unread email.  They read every single article, and only mark them as read after they’ve actually looked at them.

But after they use FeedDemon for a while, it dawns on them that reading feeds isn’t the same as reading email.  They don’t have to read everything – in fact, they can’t read everything, because they’ve subscribed to so many feeds that they can’t possible read them all.

At this point, they start skimming the headlines looking for interesting articles, and just mark the rest of them as read without even reading them.  Before long, though, even this seems like too much work, and they look for a better way to blast through their unread articles.

This is when FeedDemon’s "Next" button becomes incredibly valuable.  This unassuming button – which resides on the toolbar above FeedDemon’s browser – marks every article on the current page as read, and then moves to the next page that contains unread articles.  If there aren’t anymore unread articles in the current feed, this button automatically moves to the next feed that has unread articles.

If you haven’t discovered this button yet, I encourage you to start using it.  You can power your way through hundreds of unread articles in a very short time by flagging the ones that look interesting (or opening them in a new browser tab), and then clicking "Next" to move to the next page.  Once you’ve finished going through your unread articles, you can then read just the ones that looked interesting.

This is how I deal with all the stuff I’m subscribed to (and it’s another reason why using great titles is so important).

If you’ve used FeedDemon for a while, you’re probably familiar with the "Send To" menu, which enables sending a post to an external service such as Digg or del.icio.us.  But you probably don’t know that you can extend this menu (because, well, I’ve never mentioned it before!).

Each external service in this menu is contained in its own XML file which is located in FeedDemon’s \Data\SendTo subfolder.  Adding a new service is as easy as creating a new XML file in this folder which tells FeedDemon what to do with the post.

The format of these XML files is pretty simple.  Here’s the "Send To" file for del.icio.us, which is installed with FeedDemon:

<fdsendto service="del.icio.us" template="http://del.icio.us/{user}?title={title}&amp;url={url}" />

As you can see, there’s a single XML element named fdsendto which contains two attributes:

1. service – the name of the service as it should appear in the menu
2. template – the URL that FeedDemon should send the post to

The template relies on tokens which are translated to data from the actual post before FeedDemon passes it to the external service. Here’s a list of the supported tokens:

• {url} = the URL the post links to
• {title} = the title of the post
• {description} = the full description of the post including HTML tags
• {description-plain} = the full description of the post with HTML tags stripped
• {summary} = the summary (excerpt) of the post including HTML tags
• {summary-plain} = the summary with HTML tags strips

The del.icio.us example above also contains a {user} token, which tells FeedDemon to ask for the user’s name on the external service (this usually isn’t necessary, but some services do require a username before posting via a URL).  FeedDemon remembers the username after it’s supplied, but you can edit or remove this username by clicking the "Passwords" button in FeedDemon’s options then switching to the "Services" page.

Of course, you may not want to go through the effort of creating your own "Send To" XML files, in which case, check out these posts from two of FeedDemon’s power users:

• Glenn Slaven: FeedDemon + Instapaper = Firehose filter
• Steven Hodson: FeedDemon SendTo Tips (with examples for Reddit and StumbleUpon)

Note: "Send To" menu items are cached at startup, so you’ll need to restart FeedDemon after adding an XML file to the \Data\SendTo folder before it will show up.

Jake Ludington put together a nice screencast which demonstrates how to save time with FeedDemon’s prefetching and watch features.  Thanks, Jake!

View the screencast