A long-ish list of ideas and bugs

[anon-37641789236]

Ideas (Nice to have features)

• Ability to reorder the sections in the Daily Briefing email
• Add a custom LLM prompt to the Daily Briefing
• Daily briefings should link to the article’s URL rather than back to a NewsBlur URL (or maybe to both?)
• Option to display the full title instead of just a “long” story title preview, on iOS
• Import a list of keywords into Intelligence Trainer, and relatedly, the ability to export current training in an appropriate neutral format
• Keyword specific RSS feed, extending the current (awesome) email and iOS alerts functionality
• Move (to another folder) and rename Newsletter feeds, and the ability to merge multiple email-senders into a single feed.
• Respect training in Widely Read and Long Reads: in particular, if I am not subscribed to a feed, I should still be able to mute it (case in point: the Ask a Manager blog’s feed)
• The top half of the page is covered with rectangles and the UI is completely unusable on Add + Discover sites. I think someone else has pointed this out on the forum elsewhere.
• Article length (or reading time) based filter
• Export saved stories (or URLs) in a neutral format
• I assume this is on the roadmap, but: (1) add Widely Read and Long Reads sections to iOS app (2) update iOS to the new Add + Discover Sites UI (to match the web version) especially the ability to add Web Feeds directly from the iOS app
• Option to silence specific (firehose/noisy) feeds like Google News from All Site Stories
• “Open in NewsBlur” for any webpage to read its full text, without clutter: especially great for podcasts if one could use NewsBlur’s mini-player
• Ability to change Newsblur icon color on iOS

Bugs

• The email subject of daily briefings says “Daily Briefing” twice
• Two different triggers (e.g. one for a feed and one for an Intelligence Trainer keyword alert that matches the same feed) matching a single post results in two separate emails
• A recent iOS update removed the ability to dislike a tag by tapping on the tag twice. Now, it only works via the settings gear icon.

[samuelclay]

• Ability to reorder the sections in the Daily Briefing email

You can already do this! Drag the sections in the Daily Briefing options popover.

• Add a custom LLM prompt to the Daily Briefing

That’s what the custom sections are for. It’s not a whole prompt but it is a custom keyword to search for.

• Daily briefings should link to the article’s URL rather than back to a NewsBlur URL (or maybe to both?)

Instead of adding an option to the settings popover, I’ll add an icon next to the title that links directly to the story. Good idea!

• Option to display the full title instead of just a “long” story title preview, on iOS

Can you show a screenshot? It should be the full title.

• Import a list of keywords into Intelligence Trainer, and relatedly, the ability to export current training in an appropriate neutral format

You can export training through the API, and honestly, if you have an advanced need to import a long list, the API is great for that. There is a NewsBlur CLI tool at https://newsblur.com/features/cli and that can easily be used by AI agents to do what you’re asking.

• Keyword specific RSS feed, extending the current (awesome) email and iOS alerts functionality

So the new premium archive feature for notifications for specific classifiers but in an RSS feed? That’s interesting. Not sure how you would access it. The individual classifier is already becoming a bit overloaded, and an extra icon just for the RSS feed might be a bit much, but it is the type of idea I like to build. Anybody else want to see this?

• Move (to another folder) and rename Newsletter feeds, and the ability to merge multiple email-senders into a single feed.

I’ just launched a feature to automatically merge email newsletters if they belong to the same List-Id. We’ll see how it works in practice. Building a whole UI around merging email newsletters senders seems cumbersome and overbuilt.

• Respect training in Widely Read and Long Reads: in particular, if I am not subscribed to a feed, I should still be able to mute it (case in point: the Ask a Manager blog’s feed)

They should do that. I’ll see if I can fix that now.

• The top half of the page is covered with rectangles and the UI is completely unusable on Add + Discover sites. I think someone else has pointed this out on the forum elsewhere.

Please share a screenshot, I don’t know what you mean. It looks good to me.

• Article length (or reading time) based filter

Interesting, we just launched a feature for youtube videos under 3 minutes getting a short video tag. A classifier for meta-data would be interesting. Any other metadata filter you can think of that would be useful?

• Export saved stories (or URLs) in a neutral format

The API is great for that. The MCP server and CLI tool both make that easy to do. https://newsblur.com/features/mcp

• I assume this is on the roadmap, but: (1) add Widely Read and Long Reads sections to iOS app (2) update iOS to the new Add + Discover Sites UI (to match the web version) especially the ability to add Web Feeds directly from the iOS app

I’ll get to that right now. I did port the new discover sites UI to iOS but it’s a bit of a mess and I gave up.

• Option to silence specific (firehose/noisy) feeds like Google News from All Site Stories

Why not just use training on those feeds to thumbs down the feed but thumbs up specific mentions you want. The new AI filters can help greatly, and for a firehose type feed, it will cost less than $1/month to filter a noisy feed.

• “Open in NewsBlur” for any webpage to read its full text, without clutter: especially great for podcasts if one could use NewsBlur’s mini-player

I have a bookmarklet update / browser extension that can do this, but there’s so many good reader mode extensions out there already.

• Ability to change Newsblur icon color on iOS

Interesting idea!

[samuelclay]

@anon-37641789236

• The email subject of daily briefings says “Daily Briefing” twice

That it does. Will fix.

@anon-37641789236

• Two different triggers (e.g. one for a feed and one for an Intelligence Trainer keyword alert that matches the same feed) matching a single post results in two separate emails

I’ll investigate whether I can fix this.

@anon-37641789236

• A recent iOS update removed the ability to dislike a tag by tapping on the tag twice. Now, it only works via the settings gear icon.

The latest iOS app fixed this and I verified it’s working again. It was broken for about a week.

[samuelclay]

Your next daily briefing will now include a direct link icon (and a fixed subject line).

[samuelclay]

Two more fixes are live now.

Widely Read and Long Reads now apply your training scores, including Intelligence Trainer matches and AI filters, so those sections should better respect what you have focused or hidden.

I also fixed duplicate story notification emails. If a feed notification and an Intelligence Trainer keyword alert both match the same story, NewsBlur should only send one email for that story.

The newsletter merge by List ID, the daily briefing direct link icon, and the fixed daily briefing subject are also live.

[samuelclay]

You have a bunch of great ideas (and bug reports!). Please keep them coming, and if there’s anything I didn’t address or punted on, please let me know, I’d love to get more of your good ideas deployed.

[anon-37641789236]

Sam - thanks for addressing some of these so quickly! And for providing pointers for others that have an existing solution.

Addressing your comments and my missing information on a handful of my original points below.

Option to display the full title instead of just a “long” story title preview, on iOS
→ I don’t have a specific occurrence as of right now (or at least one that I can quickly locate) but the issue is that there are in posts with very, very long titles, selecting the “long” option still truncates the title, albeit with more characters in the title. I want to be able to see the entire post title, however long it may be.

The top half of the page is covered with rectangles and the UI is completely unusable on Add + Discover sites. I think someone else has pointed this out on the forum elsewhere.
→ Screenshot below (iPad, Safari).

Article length (or reading time) based filter
→ This was for textual articles, to bubble up long-reads so I meant a word count based filter if that is feasible to implement.

“Open in NewsBlur” for any webpage to read its full text, without clutter: especially great for podcasts if one could use NewsBlur’s mini-player

I have a bookmarklet update / browser extension that can do this
→ Is it available for others (=me) to download and install? A bookmarklet is indeed what I was looking for.

[samuelclay]

Agreed, scrolling is wrong on Add & Discover Sites. Fixed. Will be deployed later tonight.

Think about the metadata classifiers. I want general categories for article length, like t-shirt sizes (xs/s/m/l/xl). And what other category classifiers on metadata are there?

The new browser extension is for a browser archive feature that I didn’t launch because it’s half baked. Basically it allows you to search your browser history as if every website you visited was visited in NewsBlur, and you can ask them questions. A bit overreaching for NewsBlur, but handy for those who want a full browser archive of what they’ve read. That extension can turn visited webpages into text-only sites, just like the Text view. But again, half baked and not at all ready for testing.

[anon-37641789236]

Personally, the metadata that I would value (and several of these are already possible with the AI filters) :

• Article length (word count, time required to read)
• Full text available or not (after NewsBlur’s full text extraction)
• Readability score
• Contains embedded videos or audios?
• Listicle? Clickbait?
• Is this content AI-generated (low perplexity)?
• Sentiment - positive or negative?
• Using the two new categories: is this article widely read or a long read?
• EDIT: one more - language of the article (e.g., NYT sometimes publishes Spanish language items in the main primarily-English-language feed)

The metadata that I think others might value:

• Trigger words and content - e.g. mental health related
• EDIT: one more, does it contain a code block?

[anon-37641789236]

• Keyword specific RSS feed, extending the current (awesome) email and iOS alerts functionality

→ The use case for this is as follows: I want to have a minimalist feed that I will consume in Reeder macOS on keywords related to my work but across all my NewsBlur feeds. However, I don’t want to be reading (and being distracted by) all my other content across feeds that is not work related during work hours. In other words, to carve out a distraction-free, high-value feed. Right now I am doing it with email alerts.

[Guybrush]

@samuelclay

• Ability to change Newsblur icon color on iOS

Interesting idea!

On android the selection is: light AND(?) dark version of an icon, is there a way to just one of the two?
For example if I want to keep only the light one how do I do it?