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Getting Started with Zesty News
Manuals are boring. Most people don't even read them. For many people, the only reason they'd be reading this sentence is that it's boldface. This is a brief guide to get you going with Zesty News. In fact, to make it extra brief, this guide is tailored to the browser you're running right now. If you want to see what Zesty News is like in other browsers, you can view the entire document.
Running Zesty News
The idea with Zesty News is that the software should be running all the time in the background. You have better things to do than manually visiting every site you bookmark to see if something's new. While you're doing other work on your computer, Zesty News is quietly keeping your database of news and information up-to-date. That way, whenever you have a few minutes in which you'd like to catch up on things, you can access the Zesty News interface to read the latest.
Note: The current release of Zesty News does not provide an option to automatically run when your computer starts up. Future versions of Zesty News will do this.
To launch Zesty News:
On Windows
- Open the Start menu
- Look at the Programs menu
- Click on the Zesty News item in the Zesty News program group.
On Mac
Double-click Zesty News in your Applications Folder
Accessing Zesty News
With Zesty News running, any time you're ready to read you can easily open Zesty's interface.
On Mac
Switch over to Zesty News using whichever means you find most convenient. You can click on it in the Dock or use cmd-Tab (my personal favorite):
With Zesty News in the foreground, you can select "Open Zesty News Window" from the Zesty News menu or press cmd-O. This will create a Zesty News window in your web browser of choice.
If you should want to stop Zesty News from checking the news for you, you can quit the program from the Zesty News menu or by pressing cmd-Q.
On Windows
In Internet Explorer, if you have the Zesty News Toolbar installed, you'll see a "Zesty News" button on the toolbar. Just click the button, and you'll be taken directly to the main Zesty News page.
When Zesty News is running, you'll see the Zesty News logo in your taskbar:
To open a browser window with the main Zesty News screen, you can double-click the task bar icon. If you right-click on the task bar icon, you'll see this menu:
From that menu, you can open the Zesty News window in your browser of choice. If you should want to stop Zesty News from checking the news for you, you can also quit the program from that same menu.
Subscribing to a site
In order for Zesty News to collect up the news and information you're interested in, you need to point it at the sites that have the information you want. Zesty News makes it easy to spot sites with that have information feeds available (sometimes called RSS or Atom feeds), and then to subscribe to those feeds.
In Safari
Apple added feed support to Safari 2.0, which comes with Mac OS X Tiger (10.4). Zesty News can take advantage of Safari's RSS support to make finding and subscribing to feeds super easy. If you're using Safari 1.3, you can still subscribe to feeds using Zesty News' Feed Finder or by subscribing manually.
As you are using Safari to browse the web, when you come across a site that has a feed available for you, you will see a blue "RSS" icon appear in the address bar:
To subscribe to a feed, just click on the RSS icon. Zesty News will popup a message to let you know that it has started retrieving the feed.
Note: If you don't get the popup confirmation from Zesty News and instead see the stories from the feed presented in Safari, you'll need to let Mac OS know that Zesty News is your primary feed reading program. You can do so from the Browser Setup screen.
In Firefox
Firefox features an orange icon (
) in the lower-right part of the window that appears whenever you visit a site that offers feeds. To subscribe to a feed, click on the icon and you'll get a menu of available feeds:
Select the feed you're interested in, and Zesty News will subscribe you.
Note: If you are prompted to add the feed to your bookmarks, you need to install the Feed Your Reader Firefox plugin which comes with Zesty News. If some other feed reader is opened rather than Zesty News, you'll need to set up your computer to use Zesty News as your primary feed reader. You can install Feed Your Reader and set up your primary feed reader by visiting the Browser Setup screen.
In Microsoft Internet Explorer
Zesty News provides a special toolbar for Internet Explorer that makes finding and subscribing to feeds a snap! If you haven't installed the toolbar, you can do so by visiting the Browser Setup screen in Zesty News.
When you visit a site with a feed, you will see an orange and gray "Feed Found" message in the Zesty Toolbar. If you click on "Feed Found", you'll get a menu of the available feeds on the site you're visiting:
Subscribing to the feed is as simple as choosing the menu option for the feed you're interested in.
Using the Feed Finder
The Feed Finder uses a "bookmarklet" to make subscribing to a site's feeds easy. With the bookmarklet in your browser's Links bar, you can easily find a site's feeds and subscribe. To use it, just click the "Feed Finder" when you're visiting the site you're interested in. A new, small window will open and Zesty News will try to find feeds at the site you were visiting. Usually, Zesty News will report back within a few seconds with the feeds that it found. Next to each feed is a "Subscribe" button. Just click the button for the feed you're interested in.
If you do not yet have the Feed Finder bookmarklet in your browser's Links bar, you can get it from Zesty News' Browser Setup page.
Note for Internet Explorer users: Recent versions of IE have made it impossible to drag a link to the Links bar. The best way to subscribe to feeds in IE is to use the Zesty News toolbar.
Subscribing to feeds manually
With doing anything at all to your browser or changing your primary feed reader, you can still subscribe to feeds in Zesty News. In the "Manage Feeds" section on the left side of the Zesty News main page, you'll see a link to "Add A New Feed".
By entering a URL for a site in the blank provided (or copying and pasting one from your browser), you'll tell Zesty News to look for feeds available at the site listed. This works exactly the same as the Feed Finder, but does not require putting a bookmarklet in your browser's Links bar.
Reading the Latest News
Once Zesty News has started retrieving information for you, you'll see stories appear in the middle column of the main Zesty News screen. A single story could look something like this:
A single news item
There are just a few things you should know about this to get you going:
- Clicking on the Story Title will open a popup view right there so that you can read the whole contents of what was presented in the feed. Some feeds only present a small amount of information, whereas others will include the entire article.
- Clicking on the Name of the Feed will show you Zesty News' settings for retrieving and displaying that feed. There are a number of ways to customize what shows up in Zesty News, but you generally can be quite happy without changing a thing.
- Zesty News presents the date the item appeared in your Zesty News. This makes it easier for you to think "I remember seeing this article on Tuesday...", and then click on Zesty's calendar to skim through Tuesday's stories.
- The Full Story link takes you to the original source of the feed item so that you can read the full story, generally in all of its advertising-supported glory. This is particularly useful for feeds that just say "Click for the story" rather than including the whole story or even an excerpt in the feed.
- The z!score represents the way Zesty News is out to help you get through the mass of information that's out there. By keeping an eye on what is interesting to you, based on what you're reading, Zesty News computes a score for each item. The higher the score, the more likely Zesty News thinks it is that you'll be interested in the story. The number itself is not as important as the way Zesty News presents the items in order.
- Some items will have other items displayed underneath them and indented slightly. Zesty News looks for stories that are linking to the same things to make it easier to get multiple opinions on a subject.
