NewsGator Desktop - Locations, Locations, Locations

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Another feature in NewsGator Desktop is the Feed Manager.  My last post said keyboard shortcuts were the most useful feature so I'll call this one the most powerful!

Using the Feed Manager, you can decide which feeds you want to get notifications about and which ones you don't.  Brad Feld has a great post about how he's using this feature.  Brad also points out that this feature is built off of NewsGator Locations, which I will talk about in more detail a little further down.

To get to the Feed Manager, click on the "Choose Feeds" button in Notifier Options:

It's pretty self-explanatory from here.  Drag (or click, or use the buttons) to add or remove feeds from your notifications list.  That's it!  Pretty simple.

Another great use for the notifier and the Feed Manager are sites that give you an RSS feed of search items.  Sites like eBay, Craigslist, Travelocity, Netflix all allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed of your specific search.  So say you're using eBay to find tickets to a concert... go to eBay, create your search, subscribe to the RSS feed in NewsGator, then use the Feed Manager to only get notifications about that feed.  Now when the next pair of tickets gets posted, you'll be notified and can click right through back to eBay.

As I mentioned before, this feature uses NewsGator's Locations.  Locations are a great way to group your feeds and decide where you want to read them.  Check out this Knowledge Base article for more details (and while your at it, check out these two about clippings :-)

Locations should start becoming much more visible across all NewsGator products.  In Desktop, I use them for the Notifier as well as in Windows Platform Sync (I'll go more into that in another post).  The NewsGator Screen Saver also uses them, and I plan to make them much more visible in Inbox... and I think Nick and Brent have some plans for them as well.