What is the purpose of this document?

The primary goal of this document is to describe how Aggreg8 will work entirely from the user's perspective. I will give step by step instructions to all of Aggrge8's features, from subscribing to a new RSS feed to viewing the "about Aggreg8" page.

Introduction

Right then Aggreg8 users, you've installed Aggreg8, you know what it is for, but you haven't got a clue how to use it, enter User manual. (If you have not installed Aggreg8 yet check out Download page and Installation Guide). Aggreg8 is very intuitive as to how to use it. First thing you need to do is start up Aggreg8, see installation guide on starting up Aggreg8. Once started you will, see the welcome screen (see fig. F), the welcome screen is the display screen with the about page displayed.

Click for larger version
Nobody wants to sit and stare at a welcome screen all day so below I will give instructions to all features of Aggrge8. You can navigate to any one of these explanations using the "Table of Contents". To toggle between Subscriptions and Display use the two tabs at the top of the Aggrge8 screen.

Subscriptions Screen

Click for larger version

The subscriptions screen is where you can organise your RSS feed subscriptions, It allows you to Add a category to your subscriptions store. It allows you to subscribe to new Feeds and arrange them using the categories created. It allows a user to edit a feed's details from the subscriptions store and it also allows deletion of subscribed feeds. A screenshot of the Subscriptions screen is shown to the left (fig. G). There is also an larger version of this screenshot. When adding, deleting or editing a feed you will be prompted to confirm your action, I have not included this fact in the explanations below as I see it as trivial.

Adding a category.

Categories are used to arrange and organise the feeds that you subscribe to. You must add a category to your subscriptions store before subscribing to any feeds. To add a feed simply enter the name of the category to create and press the "Add Category" button,

You will then see the new category appear in the Subscriptions tree (fig. I) on the left side of the screen.

Subscribe to an RSS Feed.

Once you have a category , you can use this to store feeds that you want to subscribe to. To subscribe to a new feed, Find the url of the RSS feed (for this example I will subscribe to the Google Sports News RSS Feed). Enter the Feed URL, Select the category you want to store the feed in, enter the title and description of the feed and finally press the "Add Feed" button.

You will see your new feed appear in the Subscriptions tree (fig. K) to the right of the screen.

Edit a Subscriptions Details.

When messing about in the Subscriptions screen you will see that whenever you select a feed in the Subscriptions tree, the details of that feed are displayed in the Edit/Delete Feed box. This is so that you can edit these details and then update the subscriptions store with these updated details. Once updated you will immediately see the changed values in the Subscriptions tree. It is not possible to edit a category's details.

Delete a subscription.

You can also delete a selected feed by pressing the "Delete Feed" button (see fig. L). Once deleted the feed will dissappear from the subscriptions store and hence the Subscriptions tree. It is not possible to delete categories.

Click for larger version

After you have subscribed to a few RSS feeds, it's time to read them, Click on the Display tab and you will see the Display screen just like fig M.( larger version of this screenshot). The display screen allows you to view the content of your RSS feeds. The feeds are parsed using the built in parser, as trying to read a raw RSS feed is not too pleasant. You will find that the display feature is the one that you use the most, as once you have all your favourite feeds subscribed to, all you have to do is select them from the Subscriptions tree and they will be downloaded and parsed.

Display a parsed RSS feed.

On the right you will the Subscriptions Tree, select any of the RSS feeds that you have subscribed to and Aggreg8 will start to download the RSS feed (you will a see a progress bar down the bottom right hand corner while this is happening see fig. N)

When download is complete the RSS will be parsed, this means that all the nescessary data is extracted from the RSS and displayed in a readable form. At the top of the display screen you will see the title of the RSS feed and a brief description (this is not the title and description you entered when subscribing, this is the title and description that the author of the feed has added). Sticking with the Google Sports example, you can see a screen shot of this feed being parsed here. You will also see that there are two text boxes above the parsed feed, these contain : the url of the feed and the number of items in the feed (see fig. P).

View raw RSS of feed.

RDF Site Summary (RSS) is a lightweight XML format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content. Think of it as a distributable "What's New" for a website. Originally developed by Userland and Netscape. RSS looks like and behaves like XML. For some reason you might want to look at the raw RSS of the selected subscription rather than the parsed verion. You might want to do this to see some other information that the RSS contains that Aggreg8 does not extract, for instance the authors name or the copyright notice. In Aggreg8 you can view the raw RSS by clicking on the "View RSS Feed" button (see fig. O). This will download and display the RSS feed (un-parsed) in the display panel.

Click for larger version

Refresh a parsed feed.

Some weblogs are updated very frequently, community weblogs would be a good example of this (Slashdot.org is one of these). Pressing the refresh button (see fig. S) will download a new copy and parse that new copy. This is a useful feature if you are an avid reader of a frequently updated weblog.

About Aggreg8 page

Aggreg8 has an "about Aggreg8" page where you can read a little about Aggreg8 without visiting the website (http://www.philroche.net/redbrick/CA4Project). To find this page you use the toolbar menu at the very top of the Aggreg8 display, Simply select the "About" menu and click on "About Aggreg8" (see fig. Q). You might have seen the "About Aggreg8" page already as it is part of the welcome screen when you start up Aggreg8.

Exit Aggreg8.

When exiting Aggreg8 you can simply close Mozilla (if you are running Aggreg8 inside the browser), or choose the exit Aggreg8 option from the toolbar menu. Select "Aggreg8" and click on "Exit Aggreg8" (see fig. R). Aggreg8 will then close with none of the saved data being lost.