It might be nice to identify any feeds that haven’t had any updates in a while and ask the user if anything should be done about it. “A while” could just be a certain amount of time, or perhaps Newsblur could figure out how often a feed usually gets an update and then raise a flag if it’s been X times as long since an update came in.
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This will be part of an Organizer I’m planning to build. Did Reader have this or something? I’ve been getting a number of requests of this sort.
Don’t know if Reader had it. I think about this feature every time a site I follow has a post saying “our feed address is changing” or whatever – makes me wonder about authors who accidentally change their feeds, that I’m now missing.
I really like the “fix a misbehaving site” feature, by the way. Seems like this could be part of it: instead of an exclamation point next to the feed name, you could show a question mark next to feeds that haven’t updated in a while. Not sure what sort of actions would be appropriate to offer once a user clicked on it though…
GReader didn’t have a notifier, but their statistics page did show your top 40 feeds sorted by how long ago they last updated.
Google reader didn’t have this, and it’s something that I noticed newsblur had that is a half-step towards this.
If you set it to all feeds and open your folders, you can see which ones haven’t updated properly due to errors of some sort.
Adding a “staleness” setting on feeds might be handy. Some feeds might not update in a year, others might update every day.
This is something I always wanted from Reader, but to my knowledge Reader didn’t have it.
I believe the desktop client NetNewsWire had a view that showed you “dinosaurs” - that is, the feeds that hadn’t updated in a long time. Beyond that, it makes a lot of sense.
It didn’t notify you, but you could check that in the “Trends”: http://www.google.com/reader/view/#tr…, in the “Inactive” tab.
Yes. I used Trends to periodically cull inactive feeds (or find problems such as changed feed URLs that I was unaware of)
Yep, click Trends then Inactive to see a list of the feeds that haven’t been updated in the longest time. I use this to keep the number of feeds I subscribe to down by removing those that aren’t updated.