inessential by Brent Simmons

Tag subscriptions in NetNewsWire

At Gnomedex Niall Kennedy asked me if I got a lot of feedback about the Tag Subscriptions feature in NetNewsWire. I told him that no, I don’t hear about it all that often.

It occurs to me that people may not know about it. There were so many new features that we couldn’t really make a huge deal out of any one feature. But tag subscriptions is one of my personal favorites—I find it very useful.

Here’s the deal: services such as Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Technorati have pages and feeds for things that have been “tagged” with various keywords.

For instance, here’s the Technorati page for the tag gnomedex2005.

Now, if you want that page as a feed in NetNewsWire, you just do this:

1. Choose File > New Special Subscription > Tag...

2. Type gnomedex2005 in the Tag field and choose Technorati from the popup menu.

3. Click the Subscribe button.

Here’s a screen shot:

Tag subscription sheet

Del.icio.us and Flickr feeds are also supported. If you like cats, you might create a Flickr tag subscription where cat is the tag, and you’d see everybody’s cat pictures.

Maybe you’re a big fan of Apache. You could create a Del.icio.us tag subscription where apache is the tag.

It’s easy, and it means you don’t have to subscribe to a million feeds to find news on topics that interest you.

(It’s also much like the search engine subscriptions feature, which is definitely worth checking out if you haven’t tried it. Search engines currently supported are Blogdigger, Daypop, Feedster, Findory, and Yahoo.)