If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. That's what all the cool kids do. Thanks for visiting!

I had my first experience with coding yesterday. Well, my first experience with PHP coding, anyway. I was very politely asked if I wouldn’t mind removing the ads from a few of my RAINN posts from last month. The ones where I detailed my first time having sex. They were pretty graphic. Well, the second part was more graphic than the others, but still, I could understand advertisers having trouble with them.

I was more than happy to oblige. The only problems were that (1) I was on vacation in Dallas when I was asked, and (2) I had no earthly idea how to remove the ads from just three posts. I could have set up separate templates, but I didn’t know how to go about assigning those to just three posts. Then I found a plugin called Smartads (thanks to someone on Twitter) that sounded like it would work. But it didn’t. I mean, I couldn’t make it work and I felt better about it when Jester couldn’t, either.

Then I thought (thanks to Jester’s suggestion) that custom fields might make the difference. You can add custom fields to any and all posts. So I created a “noads” field. But I still didn’t know how to make the conditional statement required to make them work.

What I wound up doing - if you’re not already bored to tears - was to create a new category for my posts called “No Ads.” I added that category to the three posts in question. Then I created a new right sidebar template without the BlogHer ads. And someone on the Wordpress forums gave me the code I needed. So whenever Wordpress sees the “No Ads” category on a post, it automatically pulls up the adless sidebar instead of the regular sidebar. Voila! Worked like a charm and everyone is happy.

So here I sit in Panera Bread - one of Sebring’s newest eateries - using their free wifi, cursing over Twitter for being down for the gazillionth time, and writing my blog post. People often ask me what I use to read blogs, so I thought I’d give out some information about my preferred feedreader: FeedDemon.

FeedDemon is a stand-alone feedreader, meaning that it’s actually a desktop application and not a web-based reader. Web-based readers include Bloglines, Google Reader, and Newsgator. There are many others, I’m sure, but those are the biggies. The beauty of using a web-based feedreader is that no matter what computer you’re using, you can log in and read your feeds.

The beauty of FeedDemon is that it automatically works with Newsgator to synchronize your feeds. Let’s say you’re reading 200 feeds over the course of a few days. Every time you close FeedDemon down, it automatically syncs your feeds with Newsgator. That way, if you’re away from your personal computer and using, say, the library’s…well, you can log into Newsgator on the Web and pick right up where you left off.

Now, I’m not going to get into WHAT feeds are in detail. You oughtta know that shit by now. If you want to learn more go to RSSday.org and read up about them there. To put it very simply, most blogs and websites now use feeds to “syndicate” their content to feedreaders. You can subscribe to any blog (MOST any blog, anyway, the blogs worth their salt) using their feed. In fact, most of you are probably reading this post in a feedreader. If you aren’t and you want to subscribe, use the link that’s in my left-hand sidebar right underneath the About section.

Why use feeds? It’s like asking why use Tivo? Because it’s SO much easier. Instead of physically visiting all of the blogs you read on a daily basis you can read all of the blogs you want in one place, your feedreader. Whenever you want to leave a comment on the blog, you simply click on the blog post’s title and off you go to the site to leave a comment.

Not only that, but you won’t waste time visiting sites only to find out they haven’t written a new post. Your feedreader will TELL you which blogs have new posts.

How? Typically by showing you the feeds with unread posts in boldface, like this:

Click on the pictures for a bigger view. You can see in the left-hand pane a list of my feeds. In fact, I have my feeds separated into various folders. The one you see here is the “Folks I Know” folder, where I have all of the people I’ve personally meet. Yes, I read those before anyone else’s. All the more reason to get with me.

You can see in this picture that there are six unread blogfeeds in this folder. That’s apparent from the number “6″ in parentheses after the “folks-i-know” at the top of the screen. Only two of those are visible without scrolling: the Alive Campaign Blog has one unread feed (again, looking at the number after the blog name) and Pink Bunny Foo Foo with one unread feed.

All of the other blogs that are visible are all caught up. You can easily tell because those blog titles aren’t bolded. In other words, I’ve read all of those posts so I can rest easy. Here’s a view of all of my folders, in collapsed form so you can see them all.

You can see all of my folders here, not all of which are logically broken down like “Folks I Know.” Blogher has 16 unread posts, Daily Reads has 173, and so on down the line.

Now let’s say I want to read some of the feeds in my “Daily Reads” folder. I merely click on the plus (+) sign next to that folder and it expands to show me the feeds in that folder.

I click on the “Problogger Job Board,” which has 3 unread feeds and those posts show up in the right-hand pane, as seen above. From here I can read all of those posts and then mark them all as read. There are several ways to do this…the easiest is with the button at the top of the feed window. I’ve circled it in red here. Clicking that symbol will mark ALL of the the posts for that blog as read. The boldface will disappear and so will the (3) next to the ProBlogger Job Board in the left side of the screen.

OR…I can read just one post - maybe that’s all the time I have for now, and click on the little yellow envelope next to that post and that’ll just mark the one post as read, leaving the other two for later. It’s all very simple. Clicking on the post title (if I’m going to leave a comment on their blog) takes me to the site AND also marks that particular post as read. Like I said, there are multiple ways to do it.

What if I’m extremely busy and there’s simply no way I can read all those feeds in the Daily Reads folder? This happens every so often, like when I got back from Dallas and was behind on over 2,700 posts. I HAD to mark them all as read or I would have gone to Wal-Mart, bought a gun, and shot up this nice Panera Bread instead of patronizing them and sipping on their yummy coffee.

It’s easy to mark everything as read.

Instead of clicking on only a blog’s name in the left-hand pane, you click on the FOLDER name (in this case, Daily Reads). Then all of the unread posts will show up in the right-hand feed pane. From there, it’s the same thing as marking an individual blog as all read…you click on the symbol at the top of the window (circled in red) and ALL BLOGS in the Daily Reads folder will be mark as read. All those unread numbers in the left-hand pane will disappear, and they won’t show back up until a new post is made at one or more of the blogs in that folder.

Perhaps my favorite feature of FeedDemon? It’s the Panic Button. Once in a while, when you’re really getting behind on blogreading, the Panic Button pops up like so:

Like it says, you DON’T have to read EVERYTHING. It’s not email. When you’re overwhelmed or, in my case when I get over 1,000 unread posts, the Panic Button comes up and offers some help. You can tell it to automatically mark all of the posts over 48 hours old as read. Or all of the posts more than 24 hours, or more than 5 days…there are options. Click the button and VOILA! Your unread blogs are greatly reduced.

Another great feature in FeedDemon are the Reports. For example, here’s the Dinosaur Report:

This simply shows you all of the blogs that haven’t updated in at least 30 days. As you can see here, there are quite a few of them. You can go check out those blogs, see if perhaps they have new feed addresses…or maybe they closed the blog down for good. Either way, it’s easy to unsubscribe from the dinosaurs by clicking on the red X on the right.

There are lots of wonderful features you can use. I’m just touching on the basics here. Regardless of what feedreader you decide to use, I guarantee you if you’re NOT using one now, you’re wasting a lot of valuable time. Trust me, you need a feedreader if you’re reading more than two blogs. (And no, FeedDemon isn’t paying me to write the above post, either.)

So what are your favorite readers and what do you love about them?

SecondHand Radio - Dave is The Man...Getting Into My Folder...100 Things About Karl, Part Two...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Filed under Blogging, Web/Tech, Weblogs |