Help - Overview

As we all know, the web is full of many wonderful web sites.  Regardless of your interests, there are likely to be many web sites which discuss topics related to those interests.  We all have many different interests and many of us have many different web sites we look at regularly in order to keep up to date with their content.

This is where a News reader can be useful.  Many web sites provide their content in two forms.  The main way of their delivering content is via their main web site.  The alternative way for many, although not all, web sites to deliver their content is for them to create a News Feed.

A news feed is a file in a special format that web sites make available which contains some of the recent articles they have published.  You have have heard of these news feeds being referred to as RSS or Atom news feeds.  LuckNews reads both of these formats and when you subscribe to a news feed, the result is referred to as a Subscription in LuckNews.

Lets try out a web site to see how the news feed works.

Visit the following web site in your browser:

svluckness.blogspot.com

 This is a site which has been around for several years and describes my sailing adventures.  On the right hand side of the web page, there is a 'Blog Archive' area which shows the number of articles published each year and allows you to view older articles.  There are over a hundred articles in this site.

Now add that site to LuckNews.  Do this by going to the File menu and selecting 'New Subscription...' When asked for a URL, type in (or copy and paste) the following:

svluckness.blogspot.com

After you save this URL, LuckNews will go query the web site to see if it advertises the location of a news feed, and if it does it will fetch the new feed and determine its title.  You then are given the chance to rename the Subscription.  After completing this step, notice how many articles have been read in.  There are only 25 articles in this news feed, even though the site contains many more than that.

News feeds only contain a certain number of recent articles, and as new articles are written by the site's authors, the older articles in the news feed will drop off.  If you want, you are able to customize LuckNews to retain these older articles in a number of ways.

Now that you have a Subscription in LuckNews, you can click on the articles and see them displayed.  Notice that the web site contains more content than the article as viewed in LuckNews.  The web site may contain advertisements and many other pieces of information - the Articles in LuckNews often simply contain the article content and images which many people prefer to read as it is less distracting.