Creating Search Folders

It doesn't take a Scoble to quickly acquire a huge list of subscribed feeds. After a certain point, it becomes quite easy to become overwhelmed by the deluge of incoming information. That's when RSS Bandit's Search Folders can be of service.

RSS Bandit has two search facilities built in: web search and local search. Local Search searches the contents of all your downloaded items and returns the results within a folder underneath the folder named Search Folders in the Feed Subscriptions tree.

Clicking on the Search button in the toolbar (see Figure 1) will bring up the search window (see Figure 2). This is a dockable window so it can be dragged and docked anywhere within RSS Bandit or separated out as a its own floating window. The window contains a textbox for entering the search phrase, a button to initiate the search, and several search options within collapsible panes below.

Figure 1: Search Button.
Figure 1: Search Button.

Figure 2: Docked Search Window.
Figure 2: Docked Search Window.

By default, entering text into the textbox and clicking "Search" will perform a simple text search within the Title, Description, and Topic elements of every RSS Item.

This may be enough for many searches, but sometimes you need a little more power under the search hood. That's where the other search options come into play. Let's take a look at the options by expanding each one at a time.

Search Type
Figure 3 shows the three search types available: Text, Regular Expression, and XPath.

Figure 3: Search Types.
Figure 3: Search Types.

Search Fields
Figure 4 shows the fields that are available for searching:

Figure 4: Search Fields.
Figure 4: Search Fields.

Advanced Fields
The Advanced Fields option shown in figure 5 provides several options for tuning search results.

Figure 5: Advanced Fields.
Figure 5: Advanced Fields.

Read Status - checking this option allows you to check Unread Posts in order to include only unread messages within the search results. If you checked the Read Status on and leave the Unread Posts checkbox off, you will get only read messages.

There are three mutually exclusive ways to filter search results based on the date of the items.

Search Folder Name
Assign a name to the search folder in order to make it persistent. This allows you to create custom RSS feeds based on your search criteria and keep your results organized. You can create search folder hierarchies by delimiting folders with backslashes. For example, if you enter "Technology\Xml\RSS" as the Search Folder Name as in Figure 6, RSS Bandit will create a folder named "Technology" with a sub-folder named "Xml" containing a sub-folder named "RSS" within the Search Folders section (see Figure 7).

Figure 6: Search Folder Name Field.
Figure 6: Search Folder Name Field.

Figure 7: Search Folders.
Figure 7: Search Folders.

Search Scope
The scope for a search can be narrowed to a selection of categories or even individual feeds. Figure 8 shows the Search Scope option. It contains a tree view with a checkbox next to each category and feed. By selecting and unselecting feeds and categories, you can narrow or expand the scope of your search.

Figure 8: Search Scope.
Figure 8: Search Scope.

For example, suppose you're interested in being aware of when news organizations mention RSS. Assuming you have a feed category of "News", you might create a search folder on the term RSS and narrow the scope to the "News" category.