Subscribing

To create a new subscription select "New Feed" from the feed list's contextual menu or the feed menu. A dialog to create a new subscription will appear.

The data displayed in feeds can be obtained from a variety of different sources including over the Internet using a URL, by running a command, and by directly reading from a file. The source type is selected by clicking one of the three source type radio buttons. Usually, a feed is selected by inputting a URL, such as "http://slashdot.org/index.rss".

When a command or file type feed is selected, the command or file can be selected using a file navigation box by clicking "Select File...". When downloading the feed using a URL, one can specify a password by clicking the "Use HTTP authentication" checkbox and typing the username and password in their respective textboxes.

Sometimes, the data in a feed is in a format that is unknown to Liferea. If this is the case, a conversion filter can be used to convert the data into a useable format. Many filters can be downloaded from the Snownews and Liferea script repository.

To use the filters, one enables the "Conversion filter" option and specifies the feed source in the top half of the dialog. The filter is specified by either typing the path of the filter into the "Convert using" textbox or selecting the filter after clicking the "Select File..." button. The filters are simple programs that read the original non-supported data on stdin and print the valid feed to stdout, and are often written using perl.

If the URL is valid and the feed could be loaded, the properties dialog used to set additional feed properties will appear. This window is described in the next section: "Feed Properties".

Press "Ok" to save your settings and close the feed properties dialog. The new feed entry should appear either after the selected feed entry or if you had selected a folder, as the last item in the folder.

Feed Properties

The feed properties window is displayed after creating a new feed, when "Properties" is activated in the "Feeds" menu or the contextual menu displayed when right-clicking a feed. The window groups the properties into four sets: "General", "Source", "Feed Cache" and "Authentication".

General

The "General" pane allows you to set feed title and update interval. The title you can modify here is displayed as the feed name in the feed list. Multiple feeds can have the same title.

Typically you don't need to set an update interval. We recommend to use the global update interval preference which you can find in the preference dialog. This preference is used for all feeds that have the update interval setting to follow the global update interval setting.

Sometimes a feed provides a feed specific update interval. If this is the case Liferea automatically activates the user defined update interval setting and enters the feed specific update interval. This is done once after subscribing. You should never need to change such a setting.

Anyway there might be situations where you want to specify a update interval which might be more or less frequent than the global update interval. Then you should select the user defined interval option and enter the interval value you want. When specifying an update interval, you should consider the web traffic you will cause with an inappropiate update interval. Don't update more often than the feed's content is updated.

The last update interval option allows you to prevent updating the feed. You might use this option for feeds you always want to update manually.

Note: OCS and OPML directories are never updated automatically. They can only be updated manually.

Source

The "Source" pane contains the same fields the "New Feed" dialog provided when subscribing to this feed. If you want to learn more about them please refer to the previous section "Subscribing".

Cache

The third pane, "Feed Cache", controls how many items of a feed are saved when Liferea writes the feeds cache file. Similar to the update interval settings there is a corresponding global preference which sets a default cache size for all feeds. You should use the feed specific cache settings only to implement exceptions from the global default cache size.

Note: Marked items are always saved, regardless of the cache settings.

Authentication

This tab allows you to enable HTTP authentication when downloading the feed. Enable the checkbox and enter appropriate user and password values to use this feature.

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