How to Customize NewsNinja | NewsNinja Guides

NewsNinja lets you shape both what you see and how you see it. You can build your own Today dashboard, choose a layout for your feed lists, make articles more comfortable to read, and organize sources around your interests.

This guide covers the main customization options in NewsNinja 3, from colors and fonts to your start page and the way related stories are grouped.

Build your Today dashboard

For a full walkthrough of sections, Overview filters, and dashboard controls, read How to Customize Your Today Dashboard.

Open Today, then choose Customize Today from its controls. This is where you decide which sections belong on your dashboard, their order, and the overall presentation.

Choose a style

Today has two styles: Detailed and Prominent. Detailed offers a denser presentation for scanning more information, while Prominent gives content a more visual card presentation.

Try both with your own sources to see which feels more useful. This choice controls Today’s dashboard layout; feed lists have their own styles, described below.

Choose your sections

Use Add Section to choose from the sections available for your current setup. You can bring together mixed Home content, collections by source type, individual feeds, categories, Starred content, and daily integrations.

For example, you might build a dashboard around Technology, a favorite publication, podcasts, weather, and your calendar. Someone else might prefer a broad Today Home section followed by local news and reminders.

Use Edit to remove sections or change their order. Drag sections using the reorder controls on iPhone and iPad; on Mac, use the up and down controls while editing. Removing a feed section from Today leaves the source in your Feeds collection.

The Overview section also has its own configuration. Open it in Customize Today to choose which source types and integrations contribute to your snapshot.

Set the recent-content window

Under Show news from, choose the last 8, 12, or 24 hours. This is a rolling window: 24 hours includes recent stories from yesterday as well as today.

Choose a shorter window for frequent check-ins or a longer one when you usually catch up once a day. This setting applies to Today’s feed content. Weather and tickers show the latest available information, Calendar shows today’s remaining events, and Reminders includes today’s due tasks and overdue reminders.

Choose how your feed lists look

Feed lists offer three styles:

Compact keeps the presentation dense and makes it easy to scan many items.
Card gives each item a distinct card with more visual space.
Magazine provides a more editorial presentation with greater emphasis on imagery.

Use the layout selector in the feed list to switch between them. Your selection is remembered, so you can keep the presentation that suits your reading habits.

These styles are separate from Today’s Detailed and Prominent options. You can use a visual dashboard and a compact reading list, or choose more spacious layouts for both.

Make the reader comfortable

Open an article, then open its reader settings to adjust Font size, Font, and the reader theme.

The font-size slider lets you make text smaller or larger. Font choices include System, Arial, Charter, Iowan Old Style, Georgia, Palatino, Avenir Next, Helvetica Neue, and others. Try a familiar sans-serif font for a clean appearance or a serif font such as Charter or Georgia for longer reading sessions.

Reader themes change the article’s background, text, and link colors. Choices include Default, Sepia, Blue, Midnight, Forest, Cream, Rose Dust, Solarized Dark, Light Gray, and Gray. Select a color swatch to apply a theme.

These preferences are saved for subsequent reading. Reader themes control the article presentation; the Theme settings described below control colors elsewhere in the app.

Choose your article reader

In Settings → News & Articles → Reader, choose the default reader extractor:

Reader	What it does
Mercury	Extracts the article using the Mercury reader engine.
Readability	Extracts the article using the Readability reader engine.
NewsNinja	Uses NewsNinja’s article extraction.
Disabled	Opens the original page without extracting it into the article reader.

Website layouts vary, so another extractor may work better if an article is incomplete or doesn’t display properly. Switching readers changes how the article is extracted; changing a theme or font changes how the extracted article looks.

You can also choose a reader for an individual RSS source when adding or editing it. That source’s selection takes precedence over the default in Settings, so you can use different readers for different publications.

Customize colors and the app icon

Open Settings → Theme to personalize the colors used for feed and sidebar sections. Under Feed Colors, choose a section and select its color. For example, you could use one color for RSS, another for YouTube, and another for podcasts to make them easier to recognize at a glance.

Under Backgrounds → Comments, you can also choose a background tint for Reddit comments.

On iPhone and iPad, Settings → App Icon lets you choose an alternate NewsNinja icon. Theme customization and alternate icons are NewsNinja+ features.

Decide where NewsNinja starts

In Settings → General → Start page, choose the screen NewsNinja opens at startup.

Options include Today, Feeds Home, Starred, RSS Home, Reddit Home, Reddit Popular, YouTube Home, Podcasts Home, All feeds, Discover, and Settings.

Choose Today for a daily catch-up, Feeds Home for your mixed reading list, or a source collection if you usually come to NewsNinja for a particular kind of content.

Set your default translation language

Use Settings → General → Translation to choose your preferred target language for translation.

This sets the language used when you request a translation. It lets you keep following sources in different languages and translate content into the language you prefer to read.

In Home’s list controls, Scientifically groups items with similar titles. This can bring different sources covering the same news together, making it easier to scan related coverage.

NewsNinja compares meaningful words in titles, ignoring common words such as “the” and “and.” Titles that are similar enough can appear in the same group. On aggregate Home screens, groups with multiple items start collapsed and can be expanded to see the other coverage.

The comparison uses headline wording, so it can sometimes group unrelated items with similar titles or leave differently worded coverage of the same event separate.

Pick a grouping algorithm

In Settings → News & Articles, choose the grouping algorithm:

Tversky compares words shared by two titles while accounting for words that appear in only one of them.
Overlap focuses on how much of the shorter title’s meaningful wording is shared with the other title.
Cosine compares weighted word patterns, giving more distinctive words greater influence than words common across many titles.

Different algorithms can work better with different source collections. Try another if your current results group too much or miss related coverage.

Adjust the threshold

The Threshold controls how similar titles must be to form a group. Lower values allow looser matches; higher values require closer matches. The default is 0.300.

Start with the default, then make small adjustments. Raise it if unrelated headlines often appear together, or lower it if related headlines frequently remain separate.

These controls affect Scientific grouping. You can instead choose Newest first, Oldest first, or By feed where those options are available. Reddit collections have their own sorting choices, such as Hot, New, and Top.

Organize sources with categories

Categories let you organize feeds around an interest rather than a service. Open Manage Feeds, use the + menu, and choose New category. Give it a name, select at least one feed, and save it.

You can mix and match feed types within a category. A Technology category could include RSS publications, YouTube channels, a subreddit, a podcast, and social feeds. A Local News category could combine newspapers, community sources, and local creators.

You can add a source to a category while adding or editing the source, or open an existing category in Manage Feeds to change its name and membership. Categories collect content feeds; daily integrations are managed separately.

Open a category in Feeds to browse its content together. You can also add an available category section to Today for a recent snapshot of that interest.

Sort content and rearrange the sidebar

There are two useful kinds of ordering to keep in mind: the order of content in a list and the order of sections in the Feeds sidebar.

Use a list’s sorting controls to choose how its items appear. Available choices depend on the source: mixed collections offer options such as Scientific grouping, chronological order, and By feed, while individual RSS and podcast feeds offer newest or oldest first.

To rearrange the sidebar, open Manage Feeds, then choose Order Sections from the menu. Move your most-used sections closer to the top using drag controls or the Mac arrow controls.

Individual feeds and categories are listed alphabetically within their sections. Renaming a source or category changes where it appears in that alphabetical order.

You can also decide which sources participate in your mixed Home collection. Use Show in Home when editing a source, or Manage home feeds from the main Home list’s controls. A source can remain available individually even when you leave it out of Home.

Start with a few changes

Choose a start page, try the list styles, and set a comfortable reader font and theme. Then organize a few favorite sources into categories and bring the most useful ones into Today. As your collection grows, adjust the dashboard, sidebar, and grouping settings to keep NewsNinja easy to browse.