Reading from old to new.

I’m on the same boat. Just discovered this service from my blog stats (one of my readers seems to be using it), and I’m really, really impressed by it, but without a way to read older posts first this becomes almost useless to me.

I noticed the feature “Open the oldest unread story” on the options, but because the posts themselves continue on inverse chronological order, trying to open feeds with a lot of images is an exercise in frustration as the oldest unread story scrolls down for minutes while images load and increase the length of the page.

This is pretty much the only feature I absolutely need before taking the plunge and paying for Premium service.

Thinking about ways to make this happen sooner.

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I imagine the challenge is because the story title pane streams old posts “river-style”, right?

What if switching to “older first” makes only unread posts available, instead having both “Older/Newer First” and “All Posts/Only Unread” switches like on Google Reader? That might be an easier solution short term, and usually solves what most users need of this view. Just make sure you don’t instantly hide read posts, leave them on the list until you switch to another feed/group.

Does that help?

yeah, I would love to set all feeds to oldest-to-newest. I read by folder, not by individual feed, so the current “read this feed backwards” setting doesn’t help me.

I would love this too!

An easy litmus test for whether a possible solution works: serial webcomics, like Questionable Content. Right now, I’m set to “Open the oldest unread story,” so I get the next comic I haven’t seen when I click the feed. Which is awesome! But I still have to scroll up to the beginning of each strip to read one, then scroll down through it, then scroll back up the comic again, past the punchline of the *next* comic, to hit the beginning of that next one. That means users are scrolling through
each item three times–up to the top of an item, reading down, up again to the next item–to consume it, instead of just scrolling down, which would be ideal.

Thanks!

In that case, you can just hit ‘m’ to advance to the next oldest story.

By the way, this is the #1 issue that I’ll be dealing with after I launch social. I’m wrapping up blurblogs now, so I’m hoping to launch the week after the July 4th holiday. Then I’m going to make oldest-first a real possibility. This will also have the effect of making river of news (reading by folders) much, much faster.

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That sounds awesome! Thanks in advance!

Thank you.

holy crap, I love you.

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Yesssssssssssss!!! Can’t wait!

I can’t wait, thanks Samuel!!

There it is, oldest-first and unread-only are both launched on dev.newsblur.com. This will all be launching on www.newsblur.com late tonight (in prep for press tomorrow morning). Let me know if you spot any bugs, since I am doing my best to fix any and all bugs today in prep for the big launch.

Also, the river of news (reading by folder) is now instantaneous, just like sites. Try clicking on Everything, even with hundreds of sites. Magic!

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Hooray! Is there a global setting for this or do I need to set each feed to oldest-first individually?

There is, but I seemed to have misplaced it. Regardless, there definitely will be as soon as I re-build the preference. It’s certainly supported and the intention is that you just override whatever default you have setup, so it’ll be best of both worlds.

can you post when you release the global setting?

Global defaults in Preferences are in now. Sorry about that. I must’ve programmed it in my sleep (which happens annoyingly often). Luckily I had the hooks in and it was pretty quick.

thanks. Please attend tomorrow’s 9:30am postmortem on the feature omission. We’ll discuss ways to prevent this sort of error in the future, which has a detrimental effect to our six sigma efforts. Any input you have to add meaningful, actionable metrics to the release process is appreciated.

dear lord, I think I walked into the wrong job today.

:slight_smile: I hope you appreciated that. I had to dig deep into the corp bsspeak for that.

Is there a way to get the iOS app to respect that oldest-first preference? Thanks!