Reading from old to new.

How can I change the order of articles from older to newer? Right now, I’m reading stories in reverse-chronological order.

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I would really like to see this configurable on a per-feed basis.

This will be a configurable option in a set of larger custom views I’m planning to build later this summer. It’s a toss-up between building mobile and building this, but it’s next on the priority list. I need to figure out what a good UI would be for this, since it’s a bit more work to find the oldest unread story.

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FYI, you can do it for any feed with this nifty tool: http://rss-tools.overgrid.com/?page_id=6

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I just signed up to newsblur and opted to go Premium (at $36/year) because I hate the new Google reader re-design.

Then I discovered I can’t sort in regular, chronological, oldest first order.

Honestly, this is a deal breaker for me.

I simply cannot use it without this feature.

I’m a coder, so I’m gonna take a peek at the source code on github.

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Oh, I did want to mention that you’ve done a great job so far on the NewsBlur. Even more impressive that it’s your “free time” project. You are about to get a lot more users thanks to the Google reader fiasco. I’d love to see a blog post in a few weeks showing some fun graphs of new user growth since the reader redesign :slight_smile:

It’s not the easiest thing to do. In order to read from oldest to newest I have to use a map reduce, which is a slower operation than regular feed opens by an order of magnitude. And if you want to read old to new, you would be at the business end of this map reduce every single page, which would suck. I might just build it anyways and either make it feed-specific, or just let you know right there in Preferences that it is quite a bit slower, but you’re free to use it. I’m going to prioritize it for this month.

Quite a bit slower is genuinely not a problem. Right now I load the page, click “Everything”, scroll down wait for it to load. Scroll down wait for it to load. Scroll down wait for it to load. Scroll down wait for it to load.

If I can trigger the “wait for it to load” that gets me to the first unread by loading the page and just waiting for a few minutes, I’m very cool with that.

Would love this feature as well. I’m also another Google Reader redesign refugee :wink:

Even with a speed decrease, I’d love to see it on a per-feed basis. Webcomics make no sense on a newest-to-oldest basis and they are one of the best reasons to use RSS. Thanks for the update!

@Rob That’s an interesting idea. I have built auto-paging using the ‘n’ key (or by clicking Next Unread), but that only works if the stories are all read. It’s effectively looking for the first unread story. But I could invert the logic and make a new button that looks for the Oldest unread, which wouldn’t be so difficult (check that X number of unread stories are loaded before deciding that you’ve found the oldest unread). Now, if I could find somewhere to put that button without cluttering up the interface, you’d be golden. The implementation details for that aren’t so hard. I’m thinking about building it right this moment.

And done. Use the ‘m’ key to find the oldest story. It’s a stop-gap, and I agree that there’s a better way, but this is a *pretty* good solution.

Also, let me know if you’d like a loader or some indicator that it’s working. In other words, I know I need to build it, but I don’t know what it should look like, so I need at least a couple of you to say, yes, you would like an indicator.

The ‘find oldest unread story’ key would be a fine solution for me. Is this currently deployed on the site? It doesn’t seem to work for me (FF9) but I’m new to newsblur (I’ve yet to sign up, so this is the site as first seen)

It certainly does work when logged in. And I just checked, it works when logged out, as well. You have to have a site open, first, but then it’ll keep loading pages until it finds the oldest unread story (it counts the number of unread stories it sees vs. the unread count on the page … so it is possible that the two are off by 1 and you end up not finding the oldest story, but it’s an edge case.)

Same here.

9 months and it’s a no go?
I was happy to switch from G-reader earlier today, but this seems like the most basic feature possible which is missing. Why would I want to read from new to old?

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Seems this is pretty popular. I’m working on an enormous social branch, so all other feature work is on hold until I get it out the door. Should be no more than a week or two before the developer build is ready for some beta testing. This will be high on the list after that.

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Any update at this point? 3 months ago you said it should be no more than a week or two :wink:

That was in reference to the developer build for the social branch, which did indeed launch about 2 months ago. (Sign up for an invite here: http://dev.newsblur.com)

This is slated for this Summer.

@Samuel: Aha! I just requested an invite :slight_smile: Thanks for the update!