In the previous post I mentioned the new "Dinosaurs" report, which locates inactive feeds. Related to this is another new feature in FeedDemon 1.6 RC1 which I've needed for a long time: an "automatic unsubscribe" setting for each feed. This setting - which is available on the "Advanced" tab of each feed's properties (Edit|Feed Properties) - enables automatically removing a feed if it hasn't had any new posts within a specific number of days.
Why would you want to use this feature? Well, in my case I frequently subscribe to feeds which are only active for a few days (comment feeds, for example). Because I use a "River of News" approach to feed reading (or "feed scanning," as Adam Stiles calls it), I'll often forget to remove these short-lived feeds since they no longer show any unread items in my FeedDemon newspaper. So now rather than remove them, I can just tell FeedDemon to automatically unsubscribe once they're inactive for a week or two.
PS: If you also like the "river of news" approach to feed reading, try the new "Prince" newspaper style. I originally designed it for offline reading, but I've found it works just as well for scanning feeds while still connected.
How about changing a subscription to a new URL?
Posted by: Robert Scoble | Thursday, October 13, 2005 at 07:02 PM
Robert, the URL for unsychronized feeds can be changed through the feed's properties, but as you've probably discovered, the URL is grayed out for synched feeds since they're retrieved through NG Online.
Posted by: Nick Bradbury | Thursday, October 13, 2005 at 08:58 PM
I must say, I think this is not the most wonderful idea, and I hope that the automatic unsubscribe is turned off by default. There are plenty of feeds that I subscribe to in which the person may go a long while between posts, but those posts are very interesting.
Posted by: Lance | Friday, October 14, 2005 at 12:41 AM
Yes, this is off by default.
Posted by: Nick Bradbury | Friday, October 14, 2005 at 06:59 AM
Maybe this should go into the newsgator forums.. Are there any plans to synchronize the automatic unsubscribe setting via newsgator? Also, it would be great if I could set it when I add a feed. I've tried to use this feature but it feels really cumbersome to first add the feed, wait for the newsgator stuff, then go into properties for the newly added feed and set automatic unsubscribe.
Posted by: Johan Appelgren | Wednesday, November 02, 2005 at 04:09 AM