Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I see some new BlogLines functionality that I haven’t read about in the news yet. Particularly, there are some new tabs available when adding new feeds (Click on the ‘Add’ link). There are two things that I don’t care about - ‘Astrology’ and ‘Lottery’ - and one that looks interesting - ‘Quick Pick Subscriptions’.

‘Astrology’ simply offers a number of horoscopes for any sign that you might be. ‘Lottery’ is more cryptic. I suspect that it has something to do with some lottery in USA as there is no description what so ever and the only thing you can choose is the state.

‘Quick Pick Subscriptions’ though is something that looks promising. It seems to be a variation of ‘Recommendations’. ‘Recommendations’ uses your current subscriptions to figure out what you might be interested in. While ‘Quick Pick Subscriptions’ features a categorized list of daily most popular feeds.

If you have been looking for new stuff to read - check these features out. You’ll probably fill up all your free time pretty quick.

Last time I tried to complain about missing functionality at BlogLines I got everything wrong. I acknoledged the fact, but my ego wanted a revenge. It wanted me to find something that is really missing so that I could write a proper post on the subject. After lots of thinking and playing around with other tools, I finally found a good issue to complain about - synchronization automation.

Here is what I mean.

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After some poking around I found another piece of functionality that is missing from BlogLines, but which I’d appreciate very much to have. I am talking about feed-based item sorting. Currently, there is a global setting which one could use to specify the way to order the items in the feed - new items first or old items first. But this is not enough.

As an example, consider two different feed sources - a news site and a forum. For the news site I’d like to have newest items first. This way, if I missed on the feed, I can go directly to the most current news and play a catch-up game later. With the forum, on the other hand, I would prefer to go through old messages first to understand where the discussion started and how it progressed. It has to do with continuity I guess. News from the news site are not so often connected to each other. They are separate pieces of content. Forum discussions, on the other hand, tightly link posts together and it is often difficult to understand what’s going on without reading earlier part of the thread.

As things are now, it is impossible to sort different feeds in the different way.

Update: The functionality is there. I just never saw it. Sorting can be changed by clicking on the ‘Sort Newest First’ link under the name of the feed. Thanks to Constantinos for pointing it out.

I’ve praised the RSS for a long time now, but I haven’t said anything about Atom along the road. In fact, I used RSS collectively to speak about both RSS and Atom. That’s not very right and here I am, correcting myself.

I was always aware that Atom and RSS are different. I knew that both of these formats were used for feeding information off the websites, but I never took the time to learn the precise differences. When subscribing to a feed, if the choice was given, I always selected RSS over Atom. I’ve heard several times that I should do otherwise, but no suffecient argumentation was given, so I continued as is.

Finally, this post at Slashdot linked to this wiki page that clearly explain the differences and why everyone should select Atom 1.0 feeds over RSS 2.0.

If you intend to use the web for at least the next few years, then take the time and read it!

With all my praises of BlogLines you might be thinking that I am hiding some drawback of this service to make it look better. I can understand that, but that’s not true. I am indeed seeing BlogLines in the positive light most of the time. When I don’t I let you know with the same ease as I do with all my praises.

Today I realized that BlogLines is missing one important feature that I need. I didn’t need six month ago. I just started to need it now. And I will need it more and more in the future. I am talking about automatic unsubscibing from feeds. Or feed expiration, if you will. Let me explain.

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