When RSS feeds are overwhelming... drowning in 75,000+ unread items!

[Bob Russell]

I'm a technology news junkie. If there was nothing else more important, I could spend all day reading tech, science, business and political news. And it would be a delight. I've also found that RSS feeds are a wonderful way to force feed the news without taking too much time. With a web-based rss feed reader like Bloglines, you can even keep everything in sync no matter where you read the stories from.

But have you even found that, say after a vacation, you have hundreds of unread stories? It overwhelms you and takes all the fun out of it. I've had that experience, but I'd have to say that it was never before as bad as it is now. I've got over 75,000 unread items waiting for me!

The number started this morning at less than a hundred, which is a typical sort of unread story count for me until recently, and that much only takes a few minutes to get through (not counting the time to read the especially interesting stories that I read directly from the originating site). But by late morning it was over 50,000 new items, and now I'm at a record 76,385. I'm afraid to refresh and watch it go even higher!

Yes, this is definitely an anomaly. I use Bloglines, and it's my favorite feed reader. As I said, it's web-based, but it's also wonderful for reading from a connected pda or smartphone like my Treo 700p. It would take a lot to get me to move off of Bloglines because it's so nice and has become so familiar and convenient for me.

Bloglines has had some recent issues keeping the feeds refreshed and updated properly. They have a wonderfully responsive help desk, and promptly sent me a very nice note explaining the situation. One more reason I want to stick with this great and free service.

Today, I think it's safe to say that the refresh problem has been solved! No lack of news here. So my plan is to pick out my favorite site feeds and skim for the best stories very quickly. Less than 30mins. Then I'm going to take the unread items and mark them all as "read". If I was really organized, I'd have my feeds prioritized and listed in that order. But like most of us, I'm not quite that obsessed with being organized. So it will have to be a good guess with a quick scan.

I used to feel guilty marking my feeds as "read" when I hadn't looked at them yet. (Of course, that's read as in "they are no longer marked as 'unread', not as in "set aside to make sure you read them later". Bloglines has a separate feature for that, called the Clippings.) There's something unfinished, and improper about doing that isn't there? Isn't it cheating? Almost a lie? And won't I take a chance on missing that spectacular story that I will have wished I had seen?

Turns out that if something is that important, others will pick up on it and I'll be seeing it for days and weeks anyway. And it feels wonderful to see the unread items count at 0! I suppse I should probably pare down my list of more than 250 feeds, but that takes time, so it will have to wait for another day.

Moral of this story... Every now and then be sure to clear your RSS inbox and mark all your feeds as "read." You'll thank me for it, and you'll feel much better!

[RobynDeuPree]

Hi Russell. We had a bug in a code release 8/24 (Thursday night) that caused some problems with unread counts. We have fixed the bug, but you may still see incorrect unread counts in your feeds. You can reset the wrong counts by clicking on the feeds. If the problem continues, please let us know. We apologize for the disruption to your daily Bloglines experience. Thanks for being a loyal Bloglines user!

Robyn DeuPree
Bloglines

[maceyr]

You thought 75,000+ unread items is something, you would probably have a heart attack with 849,702+ unread items! Yes! I'm NOT KIDDING! I should have taken a screenshot. I thought about it but didn't do so.

This problem started last night I noticed. I was up until 1am PST and I was starting to get annoyed with the feeds not being cleared or "read". I tried to click on "mark everything read" and it would come back when I click on the folder again. I went to sleep and woke up this morning to find all those unread items.

It was hard to sift through only the new items that I need to read so I started to check out Newsgator, the competitor. I still like Bloglines, but Newsgator will now be my backup. Spent the whole day adding the feeds over to Newsgator but when you have over 1300+ more like close to 1400 since I'm at 1392 feeds, it will take a while.

Just thought I'd add in my thoughts.