Today we introduced a number of enhancements to myEarthLink Reader. I'm going to introduce each in a series of short blog entries.

We've added freshness indicators to Your Sources. In the sidebar on your Reader page, there's an item called Your Sources that you can click to expand and see an alphabetical list of every source you're tracking. What you previously couldn't see was when each of these had updated.

Our freshness indicators provide at-a-glance cues to what sources have and have not updated recently. Here's the key:

• Very Fresh: updated within the past 24 hours
• Fresh: updated within the past week
• OK: updated within the past month
• Stale: more than one month old

We made the red and green indicators larger than the black and gray, since you're likely to be more interested in sources that have updated very recently or ones that have gone stale.

If you want more information, place your cursor over the indicator, and you'll get a tooltip showing the last time that source was updated. This is an easy way of keeping track of how fresh your news is and whether you might want to Manage Sources to remove those that haven't updated in a long time.