tips & wizards

How to get the most out of your .telexer

• Fill up the .telexer with a careful selection of just a few feeds
• Set the auto refresh time for your selections to an appropriate interval
• Add custom feed urls to get topical feeds

When your idea is to be notified of the main breaking news stories the moment they occur, and you don’t care for a flood of distractions, pick feeds that will give you news, but not every car chase in town. But by all means, if you WANT to know about any happenin’ car chase, now, in your town, because why not – then just fix up a custom search and you’ll get notified of it!

It’s best not to use overlapping news sources – although it’s interesting to compare stories, one notification of an event is usually enough. Also, it works best if you set the auto refresh times of your feeds at different, but appropriate intervals. You could set Twitter feeds to 2 or 3 minutes, an often updating site like Huffington Post to 9 to 14 minutes, less time-sensitive sites to 60 minutes, and a once-in-a-while blog feed to 125 minutes. In this way the notifications won’t appear all in one bunch, but they will get a nice distribution over time.

Build custom urls

If you’re interested in getting updates about a particular topic, take a look below and see if you can construct a custom feed url for it. Very useful, for example to follow what people tweet on a given subject – your brand name? – without a Twitter account. Or check on how a search term is doing on eBay.