I’d love to see better support for untitled posts, such as those produced by micro.blog. Example—this blog:
and any Mastodon post.
As it is now, Newsblur repeats the first few words of the post as the title, which is a bad experience.
I haven’t tried this with BlueSky RSS feeds, but I expect the experience is the same.
Instead, please just use the name of the blog as a placeholder where the title of a titled post should be.
Can you show an example/screenshot of the RSS feed of untitled Mastodon posts or a blog that has the behavior you want to see?
Hi, @sy8224! I believe I just did—manton.org, which is part of the micro.blog community. We can see similar behavior in Bluesky.
Or am I misunderstanding your question?
Looks like, using @MitchWagner’s example, the Atom feed is at:
https://www.manton.org/feed.xml
And here’s a screenshot:
For Mastodon, an example feed would be Typst
For BlueSky, an example would be @christianham.bsky.social - Christianham
I see your point but repeating the title of the blog is a worse experience, IMO. Ideally the title would not bother showing the body if it’s the same and styling it so you only see the “title”. I do have some support for not duplicating them if they are identical, but I believe the ellipses is rendering them differently.
I withdraw the suggestion to use the name of the RSS feed as a placeholder for untitled posts.
However, I do still maintain that repeating the first few words of a post twice is bad design.
In the case of untitled posts, what should Newsblur do with the space that the title would otherwise occupy? I think that would depend on the view—whether we’re looking at the full, list, split, magazine or grid view. Perhaps leave the title blank in the full, split, magazine and grid view, and use the first chunk of text as the title in the list view?
Feedbin and Inoreader do a good job of handling this problem—perhaps take a look at how they do it? (Newsblur is otherwise superior for me, which is why I’m here. 
)
A separate but related problem: Feeds that intentionally include the first few words of the content in the title field for untitled posts. Examples of these are untitled feeds on Tumblr and kottke.org. I’d love to see Newsblur fix that too, but perhaps that’s a problem for another day.
Thank you for giving this request your attention and thought.
