Since I wrote out that title, I’ve actually discovered that even the option for start-with-first-unread seems to have disappeared. At any rate, when I open my feeds, now, it always starts with the first/top/newest story, rather than going in chronological order.
Switching to order by oldest-first isn’t an option for me, because that causes feeds to hide old stories (and I frequently go back to look thru past stories).
Looks like this broke some time in the last hour, and NB is almost completely unusable now. I have to spend a good deal of extra time on every feed with more than 1 unread item scrolling down to find the oldest unread.
Well, you can hit ‘m’ to effectively do the same thing, but I removed the preference because it was causing way more issues than it solved. I don’t understand, if you want to read the oldest article, why can’t you load stories Oldest first?
“Switching to order by oldest-first isn’t an option for me, because that causes feeds to hide old stories (and I frequently go back to look thru past stories).”
I noticed this too, but for feeds only, the Blurblogs do seem to load older read stories whether oldest or newest first is set.
By the way, thank you for answering how to reveal the “Community Feedback” widget on the Dashboard.
Not only does oldest-at-the-top break loading of old stories, that ordering is extremely disorienting. Virtually every other UI I use (gmail, twitter, outlook, slashdot, gesatisfaction, etc) does newest-at-the-top and having an oddity in the mix causes uncomfortable cognitive load to use.
Thanks for the tip about “m”. Using that now. The one downside (apart from the extra keystroke) is that I often can’t hit it fast enough that the first story doesn’t start to load, resulting in spoilers/distraction from the most recent story and the story getting marked as read accidentally.
Please do consider returning the start-with-oldest-unread-selected feature for newest-at-the-top feeds.
That’s because the mark_as_read date isn’t set as aggressively on blurblogs. It’s actually quite a hard date to figure out, and may be taken out (in code, anyways) so that i can eventually ship the blurblog river.
Well, to combat one of your issues, set a delay of 1 second on marking a story as read, so if you do hit the first story, it won’t be marked as read.
But I’m not sure what you mean by disorienting. Oldest-first just uses the last date you marked all stories as read (which is often automatically set for you as the date of your oldest unread story).
Already have the 1 second delay set up. Sometimes I’m just not that fast at hittig ‘m’ (and turning it up past 1 doesn’t jive with the pace at which I read stories). After 24 hours I’m pretty much turned into a lab rat - I smack ‘m’ automatically after clicking on a feed, but it does still just feel wrong to have to hit the poor key a couple hundred extra times per day.
The disorienting thing is both the order and the time cutoff. Every other stream-of-dated-things UI that I have puts newest-at-the-top and continues to load already-read items below the new items. (again, see my list of examples) Oldest-at-the-top just isn’t an option I want.
It’s proven to be confusing and unintuitive to continue the old behavior of jump-to-oldest. I can bring it back (it’s effectively what m is doing), but I’ve had three other tickets that mentioned how incorrect it felt.
It needn’t be a mandatory, default, or even easy-to-find option. It would just be nice to have for those of us who like the “pick up where I left off” feel it adds to reading feeds.
It would just be nice to have for those of us who like the “pick up where I left off” feel it adds to reading feeds.