“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.

Thanks for your understanding.

• 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!

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.

If you're using the new Firefox 2 web browser, you can register myEarthLink Reader as the default feed reader you want to subscribe to news sources with. Here are the steps to set this up:

1. In Firefox 2, click this link: Add myEarthLink Reader to Firefox 2
2. When it asks if you want to add myEarthLink Reader as a feed reader, click Yes
3. Go to a feed you'd like to add to Reader. As an example, let's go to the Apple Movie Trailers page (link will open in a new window)
4. Click the orange feed icon () at the right side of the URL bar at the top of your browser window.
5. On the next screen, choose "myEarthLink Reader" from the dropdown menu
6. Click the checkbox next to "Always use myEarthLink Reader to subscribe to feeds".
7. Click the "Subscribe Now" button

Clicking the button will automatically add the feed to your Reader account. How cool is that? Now anytime you see that orange icon in your URL bar, you can click it to add the feed to myEarthLink Reader!

[via mozillalinks.org]

To show some of the variation found across sources, here are a few different ones that offer icons (with links to add them directly to your Reader source list):

The New York Times maintains its brand identity with the blackletter 'T'. Add this source

Sports Illustrated gets into the act on its numerous categories. This one happens to track their NFL coverage. Add this source

Engadget is the place to find that cutting edge gift for the gadget lover in your life (or to keep up with all the latest if you are the gadget lover in your life). Add this source

Get all the latest basketball scores directly from NBA.com. Add this source

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner breathe continued life into their popular book, Freakonomics, in their blog, which challenges conventional wisdom about everyday life from an economist's viewpoint. Add this source

This icon is actually from our friends at FeedBurner, who provide articles from O'Reilly Radar and hundreds of other sources (including our own Earthling blog). Add this source

The Sartorialist documents fashion on the streets of New York, and like many other sites, publishes through Google's Blogger weblog platform, which is the reason for the big orange "B". Add this source

When we can't find an icon for a given website, we borrow this generic icon from our sister site, myEarthLink Favorites. Blogging Stocks is a useful weblog from AOL Money & Finance. Add this source

Some recent feedback has been extremely useful to us. Here's are a few of the issues, and how we're addressing them:

1. Deleting Saved Articles doesn't work: The problem here is that when you save an article and later try to remove it, you get an admittedly unhelpful error message saying, "Your article could not be removed at this time." Well, that's code for, "We have a bug." Our engineers have a fix that we'll be testing very soon, and hopefully launching late this week or early next week. For those of you who like to save articles, hold tight! (And sorry for the inconvenience).
2. Adding multiple Topix news sources is confusing: This was a good one. If you search for a keyword on the Add a Source page, we provide the ability to add Topix news search results to your page (e.g., "california" or "baseball"). The problem was that added sources would all have the same title Search - Topix.net. Not very descriptive. Well, our friends at Topix were kind enough to quickly change that, so now when you search, you'll get sources titled Search for "california" - Topix.net. This should make things much clearer. Thanks Topix!!
3. Categories: Categories (or folders, or labels) is a concept we've discussed for a long time on the Reader team, as a way of organizing your sources. We know we want to offer them, but want to make sure we do it in a way that maintains the application's simplicity. We're working on this feature for an upcoming release, so stay tuned.

If you have questions or feedback to share, please send it from our Feedback page. Thanks!

The module itself is very straightforward, a lot like what you see in the sidebar of Reader: the number of all recently updated articles, the names of the sources, and the number of articles for each source. Clicking any of the sources will take you directly to that source's page in Reader. Clicking the "All Recently Updated Articles" link will take you to your Reader home page.

Why not give it a try? Add the My Reader module to your myEarthLink Start Page.

If that shortcut is to easy for you, you can also add the module from the "Add a Feature" module directly on your Start Page, or from the Edit this Page link (choose it from the dropdown menu, and you can position it in the middle or right column).

We noticed some problems with the Recently Updated page for some users earlier today, where it wasn’t displaying articles and was showing “0” new items in some cases. We’ve been investigating and just as we were preparing a message for the site explaining it as an outage, we got word that the problem is in the process of being resolved. We’ll keep you posted.

Reader is growing at a very nice clip, but that can mean occasional problems. And while Flickr, the community photo site, gets to have nice, relaxing massages, today Reader required a little tough love before it wanted to get back to work.

It's back now, happily delivering fresh content to your doorstep, like a faithful hound bringing the morning paper (but without the teeth marks).

1. Better UTF-8 Support - If you ever saw question marks or other strange characters in the title or text of an article, this is because we weren't properly handling UTF-8 encoded feeds. We've improved our support for this, but please let us know if you continue to see odd characters.
2. OPML import fixes - We received a few cases where people had difficulties importing their sources from other news readers. We've made a number of improvements that should make this process smoother.
3. Adding feeds when not signed in - This was fixed in a previous release, but I think it's worth mentioning, especially if you use the Add to myReader browser toolbar button.
4. Fine-tuning of Recently Updated - We've been refining how we display what's Recently Updated, and for how long, on a continual basis since our initial launch. We think this release is tuned quite nicely.

Sneak Peek: Related to #4 above, one of our upcoming releases will include a way for you to easily manage the volume of new articles you see when you've been away from myEarthLink Reader for a while. (But everyone's using it every day, right?)

Fig. 1: Check-out Divider

It's easy to use. Simply read (or "check out") your new articles until you see the divider. Those are your "fresh" articles. Everything below the divider was there on your previous visit to Reader.

Fig. 2: Effective Use of the Divider

We tried to keep it visually subtle so that your eyes wouldn't immediately jump to it, but distinctive enough for you to easily recognize once you did reach it.

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.

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:    Safari:

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.