I’m going to start a series on Cyndicate that will cover features of it that you might not be aware of and tips on using it. My goal is to show you the some of the power built into the app and give an look at the concepts behind it. The later is something that seems to give people the most problems the first time they look at Cyndicate. They try to use it by using the concepts and paradigms that they’ve learned from all of the other new aggregators. Cyndicate takes a different approach that takes a little getting used to, but one you “get” it, you have a lot more power over your daily news.

The biggest difference to understand is how feeds and articles are treated. In other readers, the feed is the main item with articles attached to it. The feed has a bit of control over how long the article lives in the reader and most of the organization is done around it. You group feeds together in folders and don’t have much control over the articles.

Cyndicate takes a much finer grain approach and uses the article itself as the primary unit. The feed is simply a conduit that delivers articles to you. Once you receive that delivery of articles, they are decoupled from the feed and can be acted upon based on their own merits. You no longer have to keep articles together based on the mechanism that delivered them to you. You can now organize based on any criteria that you choose. This can be the author, content, category, or anything else that you wish to use. You have full control. The articles will always act independently no matter what happens to the feed that came from.

Stay tuned. I plan on covering the features give you that control and hopefully some ideas on how to best use it for your own purposes.