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Channel filters are a bit tricky to explain but really easy to use and
will let you keep your channels organized in a more sophisticated way
than simply putting them in folders and sub-folders. There will be features
coming in future releases to make managing your filters even easier but
it's all fully functional right now.
A filter is simply a set of conditions that a channel must meet for it
to appear in the My Channels window i.e. you can control which channels
are shown at any given time. The power comes from the available criteria
and how they can be combined. For example, you can configure My Channels
to show only:
- channels that have new content.
- channels that are coming from the same web site i.e. lets you group
related channels together.
- channels that you have marked as being in your blogroll or one of
your favorites.
- any combination of these.
My Channels will be kept up-to-date and so channels will be added and
removed to the window as things happen in Awasu e.g. channels being updated or new items found. You can also assign hotkeys
to any filter, letting you switch between different sets of channels with
a single keypress!
Here's how it all works...
The predefined channel filters
Open the main channel filter dialog by choosing the "Channel filters"
option from the View menu. You will see a number of filters that have
already been set up for your convenience.
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Double-click on one of the filters to open the filter configuration dialog and we'll take a look at how they are configured.
There are three main criteria that can be used to control which
channels will be displayed in the My Channels window.
- Content: By choosing an option from the "Filter
type" droplist, you can include only those channels that
have new content or unread items.
- Channel categories: Channels can be included only if
they have been assigned to one or more channel categories.
These are discussed in detail below.
- Search text: Channels can be included only if they have
certain text in their feed URL, channel name or description.
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If you specify more than one of these criteria then each channel must meet
all of them to be included in the My Channels window. You can also request
that only channels that don't meet the specified criteria be included by ticking the "Show non-matching channels instead" option (although
this option probably won't be used very often).
Let's take a look at how the predefined filters have been set up.
- All: This is a special filter that has no criteria specified
i.e. all channels will be shown in My Channels.
- New content: This has a filter type of "New content"
so only those channels that have new content will be shown in the My
Channels window. Press the Apply button and you will see the contents
of your My Channels window change to include only those channels that
meet this criteria.
- Unread items: This has a filter type of "Unread items"
so only channels that have unread items will be shown if you press Apply.
If you look in the bottom left-hand corner of the filter dialog, you
will see that this filter also sorts the channels by the number of unread
items each one has.
- My Favorites and My Blogroll: These will be explained
when we cover channel categories below.
If you go back to the main filter dialog, you will see that some of the
standard filters have hotkeys assigned to them. Close the dialog and press
CTRL-SHIFT-N. This will apply the "New content" filter and you
will see My Channels change to show only those channels that match that
filter's criteria. Likewise, CTRL-SHIFT-U will apply the "Unread
items" filter and CTRL-SHIFT-A will apply "All"
Some more examples
Here are some more examples of how filters can be set up:
- You may have a number of Awasu-related feeds e.g. one for the main
news feed plus one for each of the forums. Each feed comes from www.awasu.com
so you can create a new filter that searches for "www.awasu.com"
in the channel URL. Applying this filter restricts My Channels to showing
only those channels that have this in their URL.
- Want to see only news-related feeds? Create a filter that searches
for the word "news" in either the channel title or description.
This will probably work fine but can be a little unreliable since you are relying on the title or description
being provided by the content publisher (which may change at any time). You can
override this information in the Channel Properties dialog but using channel categories
(described in the next section) is a much better way of solving this problem.
If you know how to use (Perl) regular expressions, you can also tick
the "Use regular expressions" checkbox. You can find documentation
about regular expression syntax here
although if you are not technical, you probably won't want to click on
the link - it will make your eyes bleed!
Channel categories
We've all faced the problem of trying to decide which category something
belongs in when organizing our MP3 or photo collections, especially if
something could reasonably be placed in more than one category. And the
same thing happens with our RSS feeds. Does Wired.com go into News or
Technology? Where on earth do I put Boing Boing Blog? In News? Blogs?
Miscellaneous? And good luck trying to find something several months later
when you've forgotten exactly how you categorized something.
Awasu provides a much more flexible way of categorizing channels, letting
you put channels into more than one category. Open the Program Options dialog
and go to the Search page. Here you will see some common categories that
have been defined for you. Close the dialog and right-click on a channel in the My
Channels window. You will see a new sub-menu called "Channel categories".
Click on a few of your favorite feeds, open this sub-menu and assign those
channels to the "My Favorites" category i.e. click on that menu
option to place a tick in it.
Go back to the Channel Filters dialog (View, Channel filters) and apply
the "My Favorites" filter. The My Channels window will be adjusted
to show only those channels that you placed in the "My Favorites"
category previously. From the Channel Filters dialog, double-click on
the "My Favorites" filter and we'll take a look at how it works.
The "channel categories" criteria lists the "My Favorites"
category so only those channels that have been assigned to this category
will pass the filter. Clicking on the small button with the arrow pointing
to the right will give you a list of categories for quick access or you can just type them
in yourself. If you list more than one you can also choose whether a channel
must be in all of the categories or just any one of them to pass the filter.
We will talk about the advantages of specifying more than one category
in the next section.
You can, of course, also specify other criteria. For example, also setting
the filter type to "New Content" would restrict My Channels
to showing only those channels that have been assigned to the "My
Favorites" category and have new content.
But wait, there's more!
Things start to get really cool when you have more than a few categories
and set up filters to suit. Let's say you are a musician and are really
into technology so you create the following categories (in the Program
Options dialog) and assign your channels to them accordingly:
- Music
- Gig listings
- Jazz
- Rock
- News
- Technology
Remember, channels can be assigned to more than one category so a feed
advertising rock gigs would be assigned to "Music", "Rock"
and "Gig listings", a feed about the latest synthesizers would
be in "News", "Technology" and "Music" while
something like Slashdot would be in "News" and "Technology".
Now you can create filters to show channels that meet the following criteria:
- Channels that are in "Music" and "Technology".
- Channels that are in "Music", "Gig listings" and
have new content. This will show only channels that have new gig listings.
- Channels that are in "Music", "Gig listings" and
"Jazz". This will show only jazz gig listings, old and new.
And don't forget that you can assign hotkeys to each and any of these
filters, allowing you to switch between them with a single keypress!
Back to 1.0.3 release notes
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