Managing Subscriptions

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### Subscribing

To create a new subscription select "New Feed" from the feed list's contextual menu or the "Feeds" 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 an URL, the output of a locally run command, and by directly reading from a file. Most often, it is desired to subscribe using an URL. After selecting the desired source type, enter the source URL, command name, or filename into the "Source" textbox. For example, to subscribe to Slashdot's RSS feed, select "URL" as the source type and enter "http://slashdot.org/index.rss" into the "Source" textbox.

When a command or local file is selected, the command or file can be selected using a file navigation box by clicking "Select File...".

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 conversion filters, the "Conversion filter" option needs to be activated in the subscription dialog box. The filter is specified by either typing the path of the filter script into the "Convert using" textbox or selecting the filter after clicking the "Select File..." button. The filters are simple programs that read the non-supported feed format using stdin and output the valid feed to stdout. Conversion filters are often written using perl.

### Feed Properties

The feed properties dialog used to set additional feed properties will appear after a successful subscription and when "Properties" is activated in the "Feeds" menu or the context menu displayed when right-clicking a feed. When creating a new subscription, the default values are reasonable and often no changes are made using this dialog. After selecting "Ok" to save the feed properties, the new feed should appear below the currently selected feed or if you had selected a folder, as the last feed in the selected folder.

The dialog groups the feed properties into five sets: "General", "Feed Source", "Feed Cache", "Authentication" and "Enclosures":

#### General Properties

The "General" pane allows you to set feed title and update interval. The feed name is is the feed's name shown in the feed list. Multiple feeds can have the same name.

The feed update interval controls how often Liferea attempts to update a feed. Typically, the feed update interval can be left at its default. We recommend to use the global update interval preference which you can find in the preference dialog because it allows one to change the update interval of all feed simultaneously.

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 only done during the initial feed subscription. You should never need to change such a setting.

The update interval can be set using the following options:

Use global default update interval
  This preference is used for all feeds that have the update interval setting to follow the global default update interval setting.
Feed specific update interval
  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.
Don't update this feed automatically
  This option allows you to prevent updating the feed. You can use this option for feeds you always want to have only updated manually.

#### Feed Source Properties

The "Feed Source" pane contains the same fields the "New Feed" dialog provided when subscribing to this feed. You can use these settings to change the feed source (e.g. after a feed's URL has changed).

## Feed Cache Properties

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.

Default Cache Settings
  Makes the feed use the default cache settings, which are stored in the main Liferea preferences.
Disable Cache
  Disable the feed's items from ever being saved.
Unlimited cache
  Save all items.
Limit cache to # items
  Limits the cache size to #.

Note: Flagged items are always saved, regardless of the cache settings. So if you have found an important headline and want to prevent it from being dropped from the cache just flag this headline.

#### Authentication Properties

This tab allows you to enable HTTP authentication when downloading the feed. Enable the checkbox and enter appropriate user and password values to use pasword-protected feeds. Usually you won't need to use these settings because you will be asked username and password when subscribing to the feed that requires authontication.

#### Enclosure Properties

For each feed you can enable enclosure auto-downloading by enabling the check button in this pane.

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