CompuDrew.com

Customizing the Toolbar

The toolbar at the top of the window can be customized and I will show you my customized version.

To begin, pull down the View menu and choose "Customize Toolbar…" which will cause a "sheet" to drop down in front of the Vienna window and allow you to drag new buttons to the toolbar area, drag existing toolbar buttons off, as well as change the order.

Personally I like seeing the names of buttons so I turn those on. This can be done with the pop up menu at the bottom of the toolbar customization sheet "show icon and text."

After you've done that we are ready to subscribe to our very first feed!

Subscribing to a Feed From a Web Site

There are millions of web feeds to subscribe to! But don't despair, you can pick and choose only the ones you care about.

To reiterate, the huge advantage of staying updated via RSS and/or Atom news feeds is that one program can grab headlines from hundreds of web sites in a few seconds! This can drastically reduce the amount of time you spend looking for interesting articles! For example, instead of visiting a general news site, then having to click through many pages to find the specific category of news you are interested in, like "Health," you can subscribe to that web site's "Health" news feed, and any time there is a news item, it will show up in your news reader.

In this example I will subscribe to a news feed from PBS.org at The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. To see a screen shot I took of their web page describing news feeds and the specific feeds they offer, just click this link.

If you looked at the screen shot I took of my web browser, you will see there are many categories of news feeds to subscribe to. I clicked on the main news feed. This caused my web browser to tell Vienna to subscribe to that feed. In the screen shot, you can see that the news feed has been added to the list of feeds in the far left column of Vienna.

Changing the Name of a Feed

You may also notice that the name of the news feed is particularly long, and thus is truncated. Bummer. However, Vienna makes it easy to change the name of the feed. Just click the news feed once to select it, wait a moment, then click it again to change the name. If you double-click the feed, the web page will open up. If you find that is happening, just context-click (aka "right-click) the news feed and choose "Rename…" from the contextual menu, then you can change the name of the feed.