So after the notifications feature has been released, I dearly want a better status overview of my feeds. Currently for notifications as well as muted feeds, I have to open separate windows and find my feeds. I would like to be able to change the order and be able to locate my feed first and then see if it has been muted or if notifications as been turned on or off. I would like for this information to be displayed just like misbehaving sites are.
So here’s my suggestion to how I think this should be done:
Yellow lightning icon: This feed has notifications set up. Clicking this will open the notification options for this site.
Yellow exclamation icon: This feed is misbehaving (already implemented)
Red “Off” icon: This feed has been muted. (A more unique icon could be a better choice, like a speaker with an “x” across/next to it). Clicking this will open the muted sites window.
Grey and green numbered icons for unread stories/unread focus stories.
The top three icons should of course only be visible when show all feeds is selected, whereas the numbered icons are available at all times, just as they are currently.
Below is a mock-up of how it could look (Maybe the icon order could be different).
Why do you want to see the notifications icon? That’s what the notifications dialog is for, so you can quickly see all of your notifying sites. I don’t see a reason to clutter up a view that is only presenting info on what’s new rather than what’s always supposed to happen.
As for muted feeds, these are in the muted feeds dialog. I pull these things out of the feed list because the intended mode of reading the feed list is one where the only information you see is relevant now.
They way I use three views: All, Unread, Focus; are as follows:
All : This view is only turned on, when I need to see if a site is misbehaving or I need to find a specific story from a feed that has no unread stories Unread : This is my main view. 99% percent of the time, this view is turned on. Focus : I use this to quickly see if there is anything new here. If not, I go back to the Unread view.
To clarify my reasoning behind having the notification icon in particular, I feel like the current notification window doesn’t quickly let me see what feeds haven’t enabled notifications. I can see a neat list of the feeds that do have notifications enabled, but checking whether a specific feed hasn’t is cumbersome.
As for having muted sites displayed in the All view, I forget that i even have them muted at all, since I’m in the Unread view almost all the time. I practically never open the muted sites window, so I do forget what sites I have muted.
So the reason why I want more information on the All view, is because I pretty much only use it as an “information view”. Having icons for misbehaving, muted and notification sites would make it ideal to get a quick overview of the status of my feeds, without having to open a bunch of different windows with very different ways of displaying feed structure.
Maybe an option could be added to the preferences, to turn on more information in the All view (notifications + muted sites)?
Thanks for the tip about the ‘g’ key. I’ve never seen that search option before.
But it doesn’t quite solve my overall problem, that information about feeds is to scattered across different sub-menus.
I think the optimal solution would be an option to show more information in the All view. This would not bother people that use the view exclusively, and help users like me (335 feeds!) immensely.
