myEarthLink Reader blog

August 15, 2007

How do I delete posts from Reader?

Julie, Louis, Henry and a couple others have all sent in approximately the same question to the Reader feedback mailing list:

“I want to be able to delete articles without having to read them or go through a list individually. Please tell me how I can do this.”

“I do not need to keep old, read items. So why can't I get rid of what I no longer want. A delete feature based on age of item would be nice. Otherwise, I'll have a huge volume of items accumulating.”

“How do I delete updates from my reader? Do they automatically refresh or do old posts just accumulate indefinitely?”

Today, I thought I’d answer this question for everyone. I’ve learned over the years that if a small percentage of people are confused about how something works, then there’s a pretty good chance a lot of other people are confused as well.

Question:

How do I delete posts from Reader?

Answer:

One of the features of myEarthLink Reader is that you never have to delete an article or mark it "read" or "unread". myEarthLink Reader shows you only articles that are new since your last visit. This way, you don't have to manage news articles like you manage your email; you get just what's fresh each time you return to the page. We continually delete a portion of the oldest articles to prevent too many articles from accumulating in your account.

However, articles that you add to “Your Saved Articles” aren’t deleted during this periodic purging of articles.

Please let us know if you have questions and we’ll do our best to address them here on the blog.

August 3, 2007

Scheduled Downtime This Sunday Night

The Reader application will be down for maintenance starting Sunday night (August 5, 2007) at approximately 7 PM ET until approximately Monday morning (August 6, 2007) at 6 AM ET.

Thanks for your understanding.

June 13, 2007

Minor Enhancements and Bug Fixes Release

Yesterday we launched a new release that included the following changes:

  • You'll now see 50 articles per page.
  • We added an indicator, at the bottom of the page, of how many articles are left on subsequent pages.
  • We added a timestamp under the "Recent Updates" category in the sidebar navigation menu. This should help provide some context to the term "Recent Updates".
  • We removed the confirmation window when deleting sources from the Manage Sources page.
  • We fixed a bug that didn't allow Internet Explorer users to delete sources.

An additional goal of this release was to improve performance--to speed up the application--but we aren't satisfied with the results of the changes. Expect to see more performance improvements before you see feature additions in product releases to come.

In the meantime, if you see bugs or minor tweaks that would make your experience with the product better let us know about it.

Happy feed reading!

Maintenance Day

We're upgrading our blog software and have turned off comments and search temporarily. They should only be unavailable for a couple of hours. Sorry for the inconvenience; we'll be back shortly with an all-clear when everything is back to normal.

April 24, 2007

Finally a Simple Video for Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

Sorry for the silence that's blanketed this blog lately, but we've been busy working on some important projects that you can check-out here.

Today, I ran across an awesome video guide to RSS from the CommonCraft guys, and had to share it with all of you. If you're interested in the details of RSS, you'll definitely enjoy this, and it's a great way to introduce your friends to the joy of feeds.

Thanks to Chris Heuer at Social Media Club and Dave Coustan at Earthling for the pointers.