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.