It’s no secret that I LOVE the Opera web browser. I was singing its praises to a vendor just the other day and never even got around telling her to the built-in RSS reader.

One of the many great things about Opera is that just about everything can be customized to work the way you work best. This includes not only toolbar organization, but mouse and keyboard functionality as well. If you are going to be maximally productive, you will want to use the keyboard as much as you can, and use the mouse only when you must. ( must admit that mouse gestures are pretty sweet too, however.)

I know that most readers of my blog are probably not Opera users. Just for you, I’ve included a small screenshot of the RSS reader in use below, with a description of what you’re looking at. (This is my custom arrangement for everything. You can create your own arrangement that works best for you.)

Tabbed Browsing: (Seen near the top of the screenshot) Opera doesn’t add yet even more buttons to your task bar. New pages open in new tabs at the top of the screen. This keeps thing uncluttered. Just as you can use Alt-Tab to switch between items on your task bar, you can use Ctrl-Tab to quicly switch between tabs.
Panel Toolbar: (Seen at far left) This toolbar gives you quick access to Opera’s primary features like Search, Bookmarks, Chat, Links, Notes, History, Transfers, Information, Mail, and more. The RSS aggregator is part of the Mail feature.
Mail Panel: (Seen next to the Panel Toolbar–second column.) This panel lists all my available news feeds. Newsfeeds with unread items appear in bold with the number of unread entries in parenthesis.
Message List: (Seen in the middle) This is where I see all the subject lines from whichever feed I have selected in the Mail Panel.
Message Window: (Seen on far right.) Here is where I read the text for each news item.

Even using a mouse, this arrangement works quite well. With a few keyboard shortchuts, however, it works great! Let’s work from the right to the left now.

Message Window:

• Scrolling up and down: If the Message Window is active, then you can scroll up and down using the up and down arrow keys. However, it requires a mouse-click or a tab to make his window active. If the Message List is active, then the up and down arrow keys select the previous or next message for display. I customized the left and right arrow keys to scroll up and down respectively in the Message window while the Message List is active. (To do this, click on Tools | Preferneces | Mouse and Keyboard. Choose your keybaord setup and click the Edit button. Choose the “Mail Window” Input Context and click the “New” button. For Shortcut enter “right” and for Actions enter “Scroll down”. Click the “New” button again and enter “left” and “Scroll up”. Click “OK”, “Apply”, and “OK”. Now the left and right arrow keys will scroll the Message Window, even when the Message List is the active window.)
• Clicking Links or Going to Original Article: The easiest way to do this from the keyboard is to hit Tab and then use the “q” and “a” keys to navigate between hyperlinks in the Message Window. Hitting the spacebar will open the selected link in a new tab. (Although the new tab can be close with Ctrl-F4 to return me to my Mail/RSS tab, I’ve not yet found a keyboard shortcut to return focus back to the Message List window.)

Message List:

• Navigating Between Messages: Simply use the up and down arrow keys to move to the previous or next message.
• Sorting: For blogs and news sites, I keep the feeds sorted by Sent Date descending so that the newest entries are always at the top. For message boards I sort them by Subject descending to group replies together.
• Marking Messages as Read: This can be done by hitting “k”. Hitting “g” will mark a message as read and also move you to the next message. Because of my View settings, it deosn’t matter which one I use.
• View Settings: I have this set to NOT show Read messages, so that I only see unread messages. When I mark it as read, as above, it simply disappears.

I don’t think I’ve missed much about how I use Opera’s RSS Aggregator. If you know of shortcuts that I’ve missed, let me know. I also can’t seem to get it to aggregate sites that use the ATOM formatted XML site feed, such as the Google Groups use. If you know how to make these types of feeds work with the Opera RSS Aggregator, please let me know.