Channel filters

Channel filters let you keep your channel subscriptions organized in a much more sophisticated manner than the usual way of just putting them into folders and sub-folders.

A filter is simply a set of conditions that a channel must meet for it to appear in My Channels i.e. they are used to 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.
• channels that are in one or more channel folders.
• any combination of these.
  

My Channels is dynamically kept up-to-date and so channels will be added and removed as things happen in Awasu e.g. channels are updated or new items received. You can also assign hotkeys to any filter, letting you switch between different sets of channels with a single keypress!

Managing channel filters

Open the Channel Filters dialog from the View main menu. To create a new channel filter, click the green plus icon to start the Channel Filter Wizard that will guide you through the process.

For quick access, hotkeys can be assigned to channel filters. To assign a hotkey to a filter:

• Select the filter in the list.
• Click in the Hotkey edit box in the top right-hand corner of the dialog.
• Press the key combination you want to use.
• Click on the button on the right to assign the hotkey.

For example, the screenshot above shows that pressing Control, Shift and N will apply the New content filter. If you close the dialog and press this key combination, you will see My Channels change to show only those channels that have new content.

Configuring channel filters

Double-click on one of the filters to bring up the configuration dialog.

There are three main criteria that filters use to determine if a channel should appear in My Channels or not.

• Content
  By choosing an option from the Filter by droplist, you can include only those channels that have new content or unread items.
• Channel folders
  Channels will be included only if they are in one or more of the specified channel folders.
• Search text
  Channels will be included only if they have certain text in their feed URL, channel name or description. 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!).

If you specify more than one of these criteria then each channel must meet all of them to be included in My Channels. You can also specify that only channels that don't meet the specified criteria be included by ticking the Show non-matching channels instead checkbox (although you probably won't be using this very often).

Finally, you can specify how My Channels should be sorted e.g. by the number of unread items or the most recently updated channels first.

The predefined filters

The channel filters that Awasu predefines for you are configured as follows:

• 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 by of "New content" so only those channels that have new content will be shown in My Channels.
• Unread items
  This has a filter by of "Unread items" so only channels that have unread items will be shown. This filter also sorts the channels by the number of unread items each one has.
• My Favorites/My Blogroll
  These will show only those channels that are in the specified channel folders.

Some more examples

Here are some more examples of how channel filters can be used:

• 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 as provided by the channel publisher (which may change at any time). You can override this information in the Channel Properties dialog but organizing the channels into folders is a much better solution. Simply drag the channels to the News folder and then create a filter that shows only those channels that are in this folder.

The power of this method of organizing channels becomes apparent when you have many channel folders and filters that use them. For example, let's say you are a musician with an interest in technology so you create the following folders and arrange your channels in them accordingly:

• Music
• Gig listings
• Jazz
• Rock
• News
• Technology

Remember, channels can be put into more than one folder, 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, letting you switch between them with a single keypress!