Paolo notes a problem with Yahoo's feeds, announced last night. They flow a huge amount of stuff, even if you just subscribe to one feed, there might be dozens of new stories each hour. Maybe this is just something to get used to. I remember the NY Times felt strange that way too at the beginning, now it's very normal to get several dozen stories in one update. There's another concern, linkrot. Links into Yahoo News rot relatively quickly, as compared to News.Com, for example, which is near perfect. So, until I hear something has changed, I'm going to use Yahoo to read news but try hard not to point to stories on Yahoo from my weblog. [Scripting News]
The number one feature I've wanted to handle this situation is "Catch up on this feed". You can set Radio to have all the delte boxes checked by default or unchecked by default. However, whether I am most likely to want them checked or unchecked really depends on the type of feed. For these straight news kinds of feeds, I would typically want scan the headlines an select a few to save while discarding most. Other feeds I want to keep until I've read through.
In addition, sometimes a feed just goes wonky, and I get a large quantity of old articlesshowing up from teh feed again. Sure, you could spend a lot of time trying to debug why they didn't match agains the record of articles already deleted, but no one is really that interested and it's going to be different every time. There are even good reasons why the articles would show up again in a way that couldn't be matched. "Catch up on this feed" is less elegant, but less effort too.
An even better feature, which I think might actualy be easier considering the way that Radio does things, would be "Catch up on this contiguous block from this feed" since the aggregator keeps things organized by reverse time order. A batch of new articles that were dowloaded together will show up together, but the batch from the last download will be further down the page (or even a different page).
And if I were half the programmer that people think I am, I would just write it myself. But I'm not.
7:55:45 AM 
Categories: Radio
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