Organizing Cyndicate
In the introduction I talk about Cyndicate giving you more control and power over your news, but where does the power come from? A large portion of it come from the combination of folders and filters. The combo of the two allow you to set up how you’d like to view the day’s news and then forget about the day-to-day minutia of managing it. You can sit back and take in all of the info in a manner that makes the most sense to you.
The first step in organizing your news is to set up a folder structure to house the articles. They can range from broad topics like skiing to narrower topics like Telluride skiing and anywhere in-between. You want to set them based on how many articles you’ll be receiving on their subject to keep the numbers to a manageable size. Using sub-folders can help the organization too since you can then start with a broad topic and then get more specific with the subfolders. For example have a Skiing folder with subfolders on Colorado, Utah, and Montana.
Another nice thing about creating sub-folders is that they allow you to easily adjust the granularity. When a parent folder is collapsed, it will show all of its articles plus any articles that are in its sub-folders. So using the skiing example, during the winter it would makes sense to have the folder expanded and view by the sub-folder since the traffic will be heavy. But in the summer when new article are going to be slow, collapse the parent folder and view all of the articles at once.
Once you have your folder structure set up you want to set up filters to automate the sorting of new articles as they are fetched. The most common filters you will make are matching on the feed or the content of the title or body of the article. How you set them up will really depend on the feeds you subscribe to and the way you organize your articles. Using the skiing folder structure from above, you could create a filer that matches on title for each of the states with the action being to move the article into the corresponding folder. Then for feeds that are specific to one location, say Vale’s snow condition feed, make a filter that matches on the feed and moves it to the Colorado folder.
The possibilities of how to organize and filter your feeds are endless. Play around with the options a bit and find out what works best for you.