Handbook/GettingStarted
From Akregator
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Getting Started
This section describes how to start using Akregator, explains the user interface and shows you how to add your own feed to the list. It is particularily interesting if you are not yet familiar with RSS/Atom news feeds and feed aggregators.
The Main Window
When you start Akregator, you see its main window:
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The main window consists of the feed list, the article list and the article viewer.
The feed list is on the left. In the tree, you have //news feeds// you can select. A news feed is a collection of articles, for example, the recent news of a news site or the entries of a blog. The default list contains feeds related to the KDE project, but of course you can add your own feeds and remove the ones you are not interested in (See here (TODO link) how find interesting feeds).
On the upper right, you see the article list. It contains the articles of the feed selected in the feed list (If it's empty, you have to fetch (TODO link) the feed first). The list shows the headlines of the articles, and the date when they were published. By default, the newest articles are on the top.
If you select an article, it will be displayed in the article viewer on the lower right. Depending on the feed, it contains either only a headline, a short summary, or the complete article content.
Adding a Feed
TODO: maybe we should describe adding from konqueror here instead
When having enough of KDE news and blog entries on Planet KDE, you can add your own feeds. Good candidates are news sites you visit regularly.
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- Go to the menu "Feed" and choose "Add feed". The dialog shown above appears, with a input line labeled "Feed URL:".
- Enter "www.slashdot.org" in the line edit (TODO: insert non-technical term here) and choose "Ok".
- The feed settings dialog appears, which you can close but we are happy with the default settings in there for now and choose "Ok" again.
- Voila, now you have "Slashdot" in your feed list.
There are multiple ways to find and add interesting feeds, read here (TODO link) for details.
Creating a Folder
After adding your own feeds, you may want to group them in some way, instead of just leaving them unsorted. So let us create a folder for the Slashdot feed just added:
- Select the parent folder of the new folder. In this example, we select "All Feeds".
- Choose "New Folder..." in the "Feed" menu. Enter "News" (or come up with a better name for what Slashdot actually is) in the line edit (TODO: use ntt) and choose "OK".
- Now you can drag the Slashdot feed to the new folder.
Browsing inside of Akregator
When reading feed articles, you may often want to read the web page that belongs to the article. Some articles only contain the headline, not the actual content. Then you need to visit the web page to read the complete article. Maybe an article links to some website, or you are reading a blog and want to comment on an entry. For these situations, Akregator contains a simple web browser. Whenever you follow a link in the article viewer, Akregator opens the link in new tab:
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Note that the browser in Akregator is not intended to replace your Favourite Web Browser. It is meant for reading articles, commenting on them, or to follow a link quickly. It's not meant for browsing the web in general. It lacks many features fully-fledged web browsers offer.
We gave a quick overview how to use Akregator. Read the following sections to learn more about the Akregator features in detail.
