User Login:  
 Forgot your login? Click here.
  
Newsgroups Search:

How To > How to download and read article(s) from server Using Gravity

1.    From the Newsgroup menu, choose the Subscribe command or press Ctrl-B to see the Subscribe to Newsgroup dialog box.



2.    Notice the fractional groups tally in the upper left corner of the dialog. This tells you how many of the total newsgroups are matched by the current search.

3.    Type art in the search window. Notice that the Groups window only shows newsgroups that include the text "art." The fraction in the upper left is adjusted for each character you type as Gravity finds matching newsgroups.

4.    When the search string is “art,” press the Backspace key several times. Gravity finds the matching entries each time you press Backspace. You can put focus in the Groups window without using the mouse by pressing Shift-Tab if you are in the Search window.

5.    Reset the search now and type news.announce.newusers. Only that newsgroup appears in the Groups window.

6.    Double-click the group or highlight it and click on the Add button to move it to the Selected Newsgroups window.

7.    If you want preview a newsgroup before subscribing to it, you can sample it using the Sample check box. When you sample a newsgroup, it is automatically removed from the list of subscribed newsgroups at the end of the Gravity session or when you switch to a different server.

8.    You can also change the storage options for the group from the default (Save article headers) and control the maximum number of articles to initially retrieve. You can override the global settings for these values.

9.    When you are finished, click the Done button.

10.    Gravity records your subscription to each group that appears in the Selected window. It then creates a job for each newsgroup that asks the news server for the lowest and highest article numbers in that group. Gravity uses this information to calculate how many unread items are at the server. If you told Gravity to start with fewer than are available at the server, Gravity marks all the older articles as read and the number you asked it to start with should appear in the Server column of the newsgroup pane. By default, Gravity is configured to automatically retrieve headers after subscribing to a group. You will see Gravity create a job to ask the server how many articles are available, which will be reflected in the Server column and then Gravity will transfer the headers from the server to local storage and the Local column will be updated with the total that was successfully transferred.

If you performed the steps above you should now be subscribed to the newsgroup news.announce.newusers. In its default configuration, Gravity will automatically retrieve the headers for a newsgroup when you first subscribe to it, so just as soon as you close the Subscribe window Gravity will begin fetching headers.
After Gravity initially retrieves headers, you can fetch more using any of the following techniques:

  • Choose Retrieve Headers from the Server menu to retrieve the headers for all subscribed groups
  • Select Retrieve Headers from the Newsgroup menu to get the headers for selected newsgroups.
  • Right-click one or more groups and select Retrieve Headers from the pop-up menu.
  • If there are no local unread headers in a group, opening it will cause Gravity fetch its headers. If you checked the “Open newsgroup with a single click” option in the Operation tab of the Global Options dialog box, a single click will cause the headers to be fetched.
  • You can configure Gravity to retrieve headers for all subscribed groups on a server under Server/Properties/Operation. That setting also lets you specify how frequently Gravity will check for new headers and retrieve them.
  • If you ever want to retrieve headers from the server that are older than the first article you retrieved when you subscribed, you can go into Newsgroup/Properties/General and adjust the Highest Read Server Article.
When Gravity is fetching headers, it shows one job on the left of the status bar and a progress bar on the right. When it has retrieved all of the headers, the thread pane will show the newly retrieved items.
Double-click the first header in the thread pane to read it. Gravity will fetch the body from the server and display it in the article pane. You should now have data in each of the three panes. In Lesson Five, you will learn how to adjust the display more to your liking.