Tips for Using Zesty News

Some feeds are different from others

RSS has come a long way since 1999. Back then, I'd imagine there was a huge selection of dozens of sites with RSS feeds to choose from. Now, there are literally millions. Many of those sites follow the standard blog format: the stories are presented in newest to earliest, and each story is of varying length. Generally, a single feed will only have the 15 most recent items, and most individual feeds don't produce an overwhelming amount of information.

However, as RSS has become more popular, different kinds of feeds have emerged. Zesty News allows you to treat different feeds, well, differently. There are a bunch of different options on the settings page for a feed. You can get to that page by clicking the feed title displayed underneath the title of a story.

Here's how I handle some different kinds of feeds:

I like to see the latest world news to have an idea of what's going on. So, I subscribed to the BBC World Edition Front Page feed. The BBC front page presents the stories in the order of importance, as figured out by the editors over at the BBC. So, I told Zesty News that the order of items in the feed is important. That way, Zesty News can tell me what the Beeb says is the most important thing going on at a given time.

I wanted to be sure that I could easily spot the current Top 5 stories that were going on. So, I told Zesty News to group the items together. I then told Zesty News to display 5 items in their "original order", meaning the order in which the BBC presented them. After setting those settings, I'll now see a box in the main column of Zesty's front page with the current top 5 BBC stories.

Sometimes, though, the highest scoring world news story of the day might only get a z!score of 50. While the higher scoring items may indeed be more interesting to me, I still like to know what's going on out there. So, I told Zesty News to score the BBC World News group of items at 90. This ensures that the box will always appear near the top of my Zesty News.

There's another feed that I read that pulls together popular items for a computer programming language. That feed, like the BBC, presents the items in order of their popularity for the day. So, I had Zesty News group the items together. However, that feed also gets an enormous number of stories every day. I only care about the top 10, not the other 250 items that might show up on a given day. So, I told Zesty News to only store the items that make it into the top 10. That generally saves me from reading a lot of dreck.

Use your browser's cool features!

One great way that I've found to read is to skim through the headlines and excerpts in Zesty News and then, if I want to read the whole story or the comments on a story, I'll middle-click the Full Story link. In Firefox or Safari 2.0, this opens the original site's page in another tab. I can then keep skimming the stories in Zesty News and read that article later, or hop over to that tab right away without losing my place in Zesty News. There are tabbed browsing extensions available for Internet Explorer as well.