How Bloglines displays "saved" feeds Oct21 '05

Bloglines has been going through some cosmetic changes, lately - and the most recent has been the way that "Keep as New" feeds are displayed.

The "Keep as New" feature is handy, because sometimes I don’t have time to follow through with a feed, and would rather "Save" it for the next time I come back.

Bloglines folders

Within Bloglines, I have dozens of folders that contain related feeds. This helps me keep my feeds organized. One of them is titled, "Mac." I’m going to use this folder as an example.

When there are new feeds present in the "Mac" folder, it appears like this:

Mac (22)

... where 22 is the number of unread feeds.

Initially, Bloglines kept all "Saved" feeds as new - so the new feeds, and the "saved" feeds were all pooled together. So, looking at that "Mac" folder again - there is no way I’d be able to tell which feeds were new, and which were "saved."

Recently, Bloglines addressed this issue by including a second number within the parenthesis:

Mac (22:3)

22 is the total number of unread and "saved" feeds. 3 is just the number of "saved" feeds.

This was a smart, intuitive change.

Yet hardly one week later, another change was implemented at Bloglines, which, again, affected the appearance of "saved" feeds:

Mac (22) (3)

Now... the "saved" feeds are in their own parenthesis, while the total number still sits where it was. The "saved" feeds are also now "lighter" in color, and font weight.

The problem with this approach

Although the appearance of the "saved" feeds is helpful - it still doesn’t tell me how many truly new, unread feeds are there. To find that, I’d have to subtract the second number from the first number.

In our example, the answer would be 19.

So... there are 19 truly new, unread feeds. The other 3 are "saved" feeds, but should not be considered "unread," because maybe they were read, but still "saved" for whatever reason.

Suggestions on a new approach

To help aid Bloglines users, I would have to suggest a better approach:

Mac (19) (22:3)

The above example illustrates three numbers. The first number (19) is the total number of unread (but not saved) feeds. The second number (22) is the total number of unread and saved feeds. The third number (3) is the total number of saved feeds.

This would be more intuitive, to me.

Categories: RSS , Services , Software , Usability

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Hello. Actually, the first number in Bloglines is just the number of unread articles. The second number is the number of kept new. I think that's h ... Read more.

Hi Mark. Yes, I confused the first number with the total of everything - unread plus 'kept new' - but as you said ... Read more.

matthom is published and produced by Matt Thommes - an independent publishing enthusiast, mobile blogger, content creator, informative writer, web developer from Chicago. Never one to conform, Matt intends to promote the effect the web has on our lives, in an effort to intensify, instruct, and clarify all that is happening around us.