Sunday, October 15

Google Reader feature request

(To readers who are not named Mihai Parparita: feel free to just move along. These-- probably-- are not the droids you're looking for.)

I've decided that I just might like the "2.0.1" version of Google Reader if I took it for a spin for a few days. I installed Mihai's Gmail Reader script, and used my actual email address for all my Bloglines Email Subscriptions. Only two things now stand in my way... oldest-first sorting and customizable ignore/display for updated feed items.

I usually keep on top of my feeds (I've got less than 30), and I would like to be able to see the oldest items first so that I'm sure not to miss any. The whole idea of posting things newest-first was to keep fresh content above the fold on blogs and websites, since there was no way to know which was the first item that hadn't been seen by the person viewing the page. Now that RSS readers can know which items have been seen and which haven't, it just makes sense at least to be able to show the the first unread item (i.e. the oldest) at the top of the list.

I'm not sure how Google Reader is treating updates to feed items... are updated items displayed again as new, or are they dropped? Bloglines has a facility for users to make this decision themselves on each individual feed, and I would very much like that to be present in Google Reader.

And I know this is a totally unreasonable feature to expect at this point, but it would be really cool if the "v" keyboard shortcut (for "view original") worked when using the Gmail Reader integration script.

No comments:

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing the author (use the link above).




The Geek Code desperately needs updating, but in any case here's mine (as of 2010-02-28):

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GIT/MU d+(-) s:+>: a C++> ULXB++++$ L+++ M++ w--() !O !V P+ E---
W+++ N o++ K? PS PE++ Y+ PGP t !5 X- R- tv+@ b++ DI++++ D--- e*++
h--- r+++ y+++ G+
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------


If you really care about knowing what that all means, you either know the code already, or you can get it decoded for you here.