Configure Alerts For News In RSSOwl

I currently have 220 different website feeds configured in the desktop feed reader RSSOwl. Not all are technology related but the majority are. Like any other tech enthusiast, I have sites that I’m very interested in. This can be something simple like the Nirsoft blog which pushes out posts whenever a new application has been developed, or the official Opera Desktop team feed to know when a new version of the browser gets released.

By default, you get update notifications whenever a new post has been detected on any website in the listing. Sometimes you may want to get notified as soon as a select feed or type of feed gets updated. This can be done in RSSOwl, and here is how.

Start RSSOwl. You see your feeds and folders on the left and the feed contents on the right in the default layout.

To get notified when a specific feed or feeds in a folder get updated, do the following:

• Right-click the feed or the folder and select Filter News from the context menu.
• This opens the News Filter

You configure a new news filter in two steps. First you select one or multiple matching conditions. The easiest condition is match all, which configures the filter for all news that get posted in a feed or folder. It is possible to customize this, for instance by creating alerts for a specific program or service like Firefox, Opera or Gmail only.

The lower half is where you define the actions. RSSOwl supports two different kinds of notifications. You can show the news in the notifier or play a sound. I could not really get the notifier to work, but the play sound alert worked just fine. It played the selected sound whenever one or multiple new posts where detected in the selected feed or folder.

One of the things that you can do if you want to monitor multiple feeds this way is to assign different sounds to each alert to distinguish between the alerts.

If you want to dive deeper into news filters go here: How To Setup News Filters In RSS Reader RSSOwl

Are you using a Feed news reader? If so, have you configured alerts for specific news, or are you just going with the flow?

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Tuesday September 13, 2011 -
Tags:alerts, rss, rss feed, rssowl

Responses so far:

1. nobody important says:

   September 13, 2011 at 12:26 pm

   To merge, filter and format many RSS feeds I use yahoo pipes and to view them and share with friends google reader.

   Reply
2. Usman Azam says:

   September 13, 2011 at 2:48 pm

   Hey Mike Hasley………
   I’ll show u a much better way to get RSS news feed instantly wherever you are in the world (on cellphone)
   1. First make a Page on Facebook
   2. Join it and then subscribed it via SMS
   3. Make an account on Twitterfeed.com
   4. Then pickup your feed URLs and create feeds in TwitterFeed
   5. TwitterFeed will ask where to notify you (domains include HelloTxt, Facebook, Twitter, Statusnet and LinkedIn)
   6. Select Facebook, and after logging in select ur Page in your FB Profile
   7. Hit “All Done!” :)

   The easiest way to get notified instantly, the time when the author publis the post u will be notified. and one more thing, the TwitterFeed also provide an option that what to send as your status on FB Page,
   1. Only Title
   2. Only Description
   3. Title & Description (with bit.ly links)

   :)

   Reply
3. Matt says:

   September 14, 2011 at 7:01 am

   I use Google Reader. After a recent trimming of redundant and dead feeds, I’m now down to 162 subscriptions.

   I don’t have any sort of news-specific alerts but I do use Scriptish with the “GReader Favicon Alerts” userscript. It lets me keep an eye on the number of unread items by glancing at the favicon. I have Reader open pretty much all the time anyhow, pinned as an app tab.

   Reply