I keep hearing different comments how the RSS in devonthink is getting better, I’ve been a long time user of NewNewsWire and very happy with it, but in the last week it looks like newsgator has given up using their own servers and is converting everything to sync with google news. While this is handy I guess, I’m one of those people who doesn’t want to upload my entire life into google’s care, I use office (no slagging please yes I know it’s terrible and all, but the real world usually wants it and I don’t have the time to futz around with almost works in Pages or OOO, I find Pages really pleasant to use for what its worth, unlike OOO), I’m not a big fan of google docs (where the recent twitter documents were all leaked from), gmail and for lack of a better way of expressing it, do not want google cataloging what feeds I read and then offering to sell me more junk.
Could anyone who has used NNW in the past and switched over to devonthink for rss give me any advice about the best way to accomplish this? Are you happy with the choice you made or are there some problems still?
The biggest question would be, where do the default .css stylesheets for rss feeds in devonthink live? There’s default, newspaper and tiger, I would just like to make my own please. I assume I can do this?
Sorry one more dumb question: how do I make devonthink the default rss reader? Right now everything rss automatically opens in NNW, I’ve long forgotten what I did, if anything, to make it the default and got rss out of email and safari.
It’s in Safari’s preferences. Click on the RSS tab of Safari’s prefs panel. The first item is “Default RSS Reader.” Choose from the drop-down list and you’re set to go.
The easiest transition is to export all your feeds as OPML and to import the OPML file into a DEVONthink Pro database.
Custom stylesheets can be added to the folder ~/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink Pro 2/Stylesheets and are accessible via the preferences afterwards.
Ok thanks to everyone who gave me advice, my question was in fact inside the manual (about how to make my own css file) no problem, mission accomplished.
I read this after having already tried to just drag and drop my rss feeds into devonthink and finding it turned them into bookmarks instead, so what i wound up doing was going through all the junk in netnewswire and paring it down to maybe 200 I actually read (nnw was great for giving me all the statistics on what I never read
I am so far having no problems at all, it all works very well and I like the rss integration for topically and contextually relevent information inside of databases. I’m not sure why I never tried it before, I guess NNW switching to google finally did it… it is all very simple but elegant. not sure what’s best for me in how to organize the views, but if my test run works out I think that NNW is yet another accplication I dont really need for anything anymore (fingers crossed, so far I am very happy).
thank you for the reply to my questions, at least one of which was not reading what’s in the manual. Sorry devonthink is very large, it takes a while to realise that I am using maybe 8% of the features at best, it’s kind of like starting photoshop I mean that as a compliment btw.
I remember when simply being told or telling someone to RTFM used to be encouraged, before the politically correct police decided “we” should be overly sensitively about its usage (and more modern derivatives, e.g. “Google it”, c.f. UTFG).
The NNW/NewsGator changes may be part of my reason to give DT’s RSS support a fresh look.
Not sure if you mean you’re sorry about the app’s largeness or your experience with its largeness.
At least you’re aware of that and sticking with it. I’m wonder how many people using it don’t see its depth, or give up on it relatively quickly because of that or also because it seems too daunting.
I switched over to using DT as my default RSS reader when NNW moved over to Google. After a few weeks, I can say that DT has some advantages, which are those that make DT great: immediate integration with the AI and the rest of the database, easy archiving, etc. I have opted to integrate my RSS feeds in relevant databases rather than creating a database specifically for them, and to remove articles older than one month.
On the other hand, it’s hard to beat NNW’s ease of use. It’s also handy to jump strait to the next unread feed (in DT you could make an “unread” smart folder I guess…). Something I did after a suggestion from Christian G. was to assign cmd-K as a shortcut to Mark All as Read
I’d say, stick with it as long as you need to re-assign your muscle memory, and if DT is still not suited for your use, well, there are several options out there…
That’s what’s great about this forum (DT/DN Usage Scenarios), I didn’t know I could use DTPO as an RSS reader (It may have been there since v1, I don’t know). Point is, I’ve been struggling with finding the “just right” RSS reader and DTPO (for me) is “just right”.
Though maybe nobody is reading this or cares, but I just thought I’d give my experiences for about a month of using devonthink as my main rss reader now.
It took a little bit of getting used to switching from netnewswire, what i’ve ended up doing is keeping smaller groups of rss feeds in places where they are relevant to content I want to keep tabs on. This is very handy and has kind of changed the way I use rss.
I then have a main big folder which contains all the junk that used to be in nnw, but when I look through all of its great statistics, what I find is that i’m subscribed to 900 feeds and only read 20 of them. So I’ve deleted a lot of them, down to 200 feeds.
It’s hard to compare exactly, nnw had many more features then dt does for reading rss, but I never really used the features and wasn’t a big power user and when I did use the advanced features to tell me how much of all this collected junk I was reading, the answer was nearly none of it. Then what most of the tools did was let me move the content into something else like dt
Unless there is some giant problem, I am going to stick with dt for rss. I do nope the snow leopard version arrives soon, I don’t know exactly what is wrong with it, but devonthink is the last big app I use which still isnt working well in sl.
Trying to ungoogle I started to use DTpro as a rss reader, so far so good, but…
Is there a possibility to change the font size of the text more permanently, I tried three css style sheets as per DT, but still no fonts that are comforting to my eyes.
any suggestions?
You can create your own css style sheets and save them in the folder Application Support>DEVONthink Pro 2>StyleSheets, creating the folder if needed. I copied the NetNewsWire sheet that I was using and edited the sheet to get the default font that I wanted.
Relative to software development, I keep mac and iphone developer feeds in DTPO2 and leave all the everyday “read-once” news to NetNewsWire/Mac + Byline/iPhone. (FWIW, Byline has a nice offline caching mode where it’ll cache the feed entry + web site backing the story) For everyday “read-later-read-once”, I push to Instapaper.
This approach thinned out my feeds and invited me to load them with more throw-away news. I kept narrowly focused because I was inundated with useful, deep-thought material among quick headlines. Under the split approach, knowing that all my feeds were constantly updating with throw-away information allowed me to scan updates faster. Anything that can’t be read quickly just gets pushed to Instapaper and I read instapaper when I’m afforded more time.
From a software development perspective, it ties the research to the only device suitable for using the research, and helps keep from saturating the time away from the computer with research information.
I’m sorry, would someone be willing to walk me though setting up my own style sheet. All I want to do is increase the font size, but the folder Application Support>DEVONthink Pro 2>StyleSheets is empty on my machine, so I don’t know where to start. Thanks in advance.
It’s just a css stylesheet. Explaining how to use css may be a little overboard for a devonthink thread, there are many books and tutorials available, but I’m far from being a css expert, all I did was load up the default styles that I did not like that come with devonthink, adjust the fonts and font sizes in the stylesheet which are kind of obvious and then save the styles I wanted.
My question about how to do this was answered in the 2nd post of this thread that we’re in.
My only request would be sometime in a future update, if it would be possible to save my custom stylesheets in some directory that isn’t putting it into the middle of devonthink’s resource folder inside the app. I just updated to the new SL version (thank you!) and noticed all my stylesheets are gone and get overwritten. Not a big deal to find my old copy and get them back, but I’d think it would be a little eaisier to give them some subdirectory inside devonthink’s application support folder so that I don’t have to copy over my custom stylesheets every single time devonthink is updated.
Custom stylesheets can be added to the folder ~/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink Pro 2/Stylesheets and are accessible via the preferences afterwards.
I mean that as a compliment btw.
