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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.

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.

July 18, 2006

Health Tips for Your Sources

As much as a balanced breakfast, a healthy regimen of news reading can start your day off right. Here are two tips to help you consume 100% of your recommended daily allowance of news articles and blog posts in myEarthLink Reader:

Add to myReader Button

A great way to keep a steady influx of your interests flowing into myEarthLink Reader is to use the Add to my Reader toolbar button. I use this often to quickly add a news source to myReader from the web site I want to track. Using either the Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari browser, I can easily tell when a web site has a feed I can add to myReader. These indicators appear:

Firefox: Firefox RSS icon   Safari: Safari RSS icon

Incidentally, the next version of Microsoft Internet Explorer will use the same orange icon as Firefox, which we at EarthLink are thrilled about, since it so nicely matches our color palette.

After adding the toolbar button to whichever browser you use, you're just a click away from adding a website to the sources you watch.

Manage Sources

I personally track between 150 and 200 sources at any given time in myReader. I use the Manage Sources page to weed out sources that are either stale or no longer interest me.

On the Manage Sources page, you can:

  • Edit the title and description of any source you subscribe to
  • Find out the last time each of your sources updated with a new article
  • Be alerted to sources that haven't updated in the past month, and therefore...
  • Remove sources you no longer want to track

Making it easy to add and remove sources based on your interests will keep your myReader experience fresh and relevant, with daily and even hourly updates of the things you want to see.