NewsGator Go! - Trimming the Fat
October 17th, 2006
One of the issues that power users face when trying to consume their RSS feeds on mobile devices is the sheer volume of data… A typical power user may have hundreds of feeds and thousands of unread articles. On a side, I recently heard Guy Kawasaki say that he has 21K RSS feeds – Wow!
Now, I have built NewsGator Go! in such a way that it can handle this load. But the fact of the matter is that if you have this much data, it is going to take time to fetch and it is going to take time to load. This is a result of slower networks and limited device memory which forces me to do some creative File I/O (expensive on mobile) in order to handle large amounts of data.
But do not fear, there is a way to address this issue. Like I said, if you want all your feeds pumped to your device you can do that, but it may make sense to whittle down your mobile feed set to something that is more manageable. This is a piece of cake with NewsGator Go! It is all based around NewsGator locations!
Here is what you need to do:
   1. Go to NewsGator Online and sign in
   2. Go to My Settings | Edit Locations
  Â
   3. You will see a NewsGator Go! location that gets automagically created for you. The name will look like this NGMobile-yourdevicename
      Â
       a. There is a great option here to enable/disable automatically include new feeds to this location that you should be aware of (I prefer to have new feeds added to my mobile and I can remove later if necessary)
       b. More importantly, you can modify the feed list. By default all your existing feeds get added to this mobile location so all you have to do is uncheck the feeds you don’t want to show up on your mobile and you are good to Go!
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This feature kicks butt! Check it out.
Entry Filed under: Mobile
October 18th, 2006 at 10:16 am
that is wicked cool. i am looking forward to the NewsGator Go for the blackberry?!?! now that will be cool…that way when i am out snowshoeing today i can still be reading my standingmobile feed
October 18th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
Hi Kevin,
Locations is a lifesaver on mobile devices… I have a lot of feeds (nowhere near 21K - ouch!) and being able to have a subset on the phone is great. Do you have anything in the enhancements queue to address removing a feed from a location ON the device?
Like you, I have all new/added feeds go to the device by default. Often, I’ll be reading feeds on the device and decide a particular feed just doesn’t “work” so well on my phone. It’d be cool if I could tell the NGOS to remove that feed from the device’s location when I next sync. Currently, I have to remember to do that the next time I log into the NGO site (which is rare, thanks to Go! and FeedDemon).
Keep up the great work!
Jeff
October 18th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
Adam… it may be hard to work the thumb wheel with the mittens on
Jeff… great idea and solid use case for nixing a feed from the device. It is easy to do and will be done!
October 21st, 2006 at 10:44 pm
Very nice, but Id does take a while do get my feeds down. Another possible solution would be an automatic download of all my feeds at a given time… say 5 am. This way, I could read any of the feeds I choose when I am in a location with no signal.
October 22nd, 2006 at 3:53 pm
I don’t have 21,000 feeds. 21,000 people subscribe to to my blog’s feed.
Thanks,
Guy
October 22nd, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Ahh… thanks for the clarification Guy. I was thinking it would be pretty remarkable to be able to keep up with that many feeds. I only subscribe to just under 200 feeds and can barely keep up.
That was a cool podcast you did on Venture Voice - thanks for that!
October 23rd, 2006 at 4:17 pm
Hey Sandy,
Scheduled sync is definitely on the road map… this will be coming to a Windows Mobile device near you real soon!
November 7th, 2006 at 11:52 am
Two questions regarding “NewsGator Go!”:
1. Does it support downloading of audio and/or video podcasts?
2. Is a PalmOS version in development? If so, I would be very interested in beta-testing.
November 27th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
just tried this out after your mail Kevin and it works great with one niggle, I group all my feeds together for things like ‘daily’ ‘mobile’ ‘voIP’ etc so instead of going through the full list it would be super cool to be able to also select/deselect at a group level - please !
November 27th, 2006 at 8:22 pm
Mike, media support is coming real soon… I am just about to post on that. And a J2ME version is real close as well.
November 27th, 2006 at 8:23 pm
Ian, you are not the first person to make this request
It is definitely on the hit list! Thanks.
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