Deselecting the active feed

Sometimes, I just want so see a quick overview of new items on a certain feed.

Example: I have my subscribed YouTube channels as a feed in Newsblur. I’m not interested in some of the videos, which I then quickly mark as read. For the items I’m interested in, I want to keep them as unread, so that I can watch the videos later, when I have some time.

(That means that I use that channel in two ways: 1) Marking uninteresting items as read, which I do when I only have little time, and 2) Actually watching the videos, which I do when I have more time to spare.)

Problem: After marking some of the entries as read, Newsblur stays on that view. By moving the mouse up to the browser’s tab bar, I risk hovering over some unread items and accidentally marking them as read.

Suggestion: It would be great to be able to “reset” or “deselect” the selected feed, effectively returning to the same view that one sees when visiting https://newsblur.com .

I have two workarounds:

  1. Selecting a feed that is not so important to me, and where losing a few unread items would not hurt. (New questions on StackOverflow, for example.)
  2. Manually editing the current URL in the browser, resetting it to https://newsblur.com .
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You can hit “d” on your keyboard to return to the dashboard.
You can also tweak your feed settings to mark as read after a delay or after you hit the “u” key (Preferences > Feeds for that option) rather than instantly.

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Wow, that’s a great tip, thanks!
Still, it would be nice if there would be a button for the dashboard shortcut. Sometimes when just browsing, I like to only use the mouse.
But of course, with your suggestion, the priority of that feature request is much, much lower for me now.

There’s a way with the mouse, too, though it’s rather hidden! You can hover over the top bar in the feed list. It will change from a count of unread feeds to say “Dashboard” which you can click to get back. :slight_smile:

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Oh, wow! Thats amazing! :slight_smile:
In that case, I retract my feature request. Everything I need is already there.
Thanks so much! You obviously know a lot about Newsblur, it’s good that you share it.

Happy to help! I have a good memory for UI/UX so I may as well do something with all this otherwise useless knowledge :slight_smile:

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You can also hit ‘esc’ to return to the dashboard. The coming re-design has a home button in the top left that will be a lot more obvious.

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