FeedDemon 1.6: Feed Reports

Yesterday I mentioned that I was going to blog about some of the new features in FeedDemon 1.6 RC1, so I'll get things rolling by introducing the new Feed Reports (Tools|Reports) which display the following information:

1. "Most Visited" feeds
2. "Least Visited" feeds
3. "Dinosaurs" - the feeds that haven't had new posts in the longest time (hat tip to Brent Simmons)

The "Dinosaurs" report is the one I like the best, since it enables quickly unsubscribing from inactive feeds. BTW, if you have ideas for other feed reports, please let me know.

Power Tip: If you'd like to change how the reports look, try editing the file Report.xsl in FeedDemon's \Data subfolder.

Comments

[Matthew]

I don't understand what's wrong with "Dinosaurs." The reason i like using FeedDemon is that i enjoy reading sites that don't update frequently, but when they do, it's worthy of my attention. They may not have a lot to say, but when they do, it's profound. I don't want to miss those. If i have a friend that only posts twice a year, it seems like a perfect application of subscribing to an RSS feed rather than making repeat trips to the site. Why say that a feed isn't worth of subscription unless they produce a certain level of output? What's the harm in staying subscribed to a "lightly active" feed?

I'd rather have a category for feeds that dump an unhealthy abundance of article without any editorial discretion. Those are the feeds that are demanding my attention and can become overwhelming. If i fear RSS burnout, these are the ones to blame.

[Thomas Stache]

Nick, you're really getting a hang on that fading effect that debuted in "PhotoStrip", huh?

[Thomas Stache]

Matthew, I don't understand your point. "Dinosaurs" just *lists* the "Top 10 Dinosaurs", to give you an overview. If you have 300 feeds it *might* happen that you don't remember one or the other stale feed. But you're never forced to unsubscribe from your "light-blogging" friends.

[Nick Bradbury]

Matthew, I'll echo Thomas's comment and say that there's nothing wrong with dinosaurs - this report simply locates them and enables unsubscribing from them.

I like your idea of locating feeds that are too active, though - a "Most active feeds" report might be a good addition.

[critter42]

I love these reports - I'll second the "most active" report, but I can think of another report I'd love to see as well - largest feed size (in kb or Mb) so we can track down those feeds that are bottlenecking FD due to their sheer size or are just megabyte monster feeds that consume too much space for too little original content.

Also, can you give us ANY hints to the Easter Egg?

[OSUKid7]

Maybe I'm alone here, but my main problem with reports is I don't typically view individual feeds at a time - I view the entire newspaper for a folder. I try to go through all of my folders and read/mark all as read a few times a day, so I can actually keep up with the latest news. The Reports only seem to pick up "Visits" when I actualyl click on the feed to view it individually.

Anyone thoughts on this problem? Unless this is changed, I don't see Reports being very useful to myself.

[Nick Bradbury]

You're not alone here - I actually use FeedDemon the same way. Perhaps in addition to # of visits (clicks), I could also track the # of views, which would include when a feed is viewed in the folder newspaper?

BTW, keep in mind that the "Dinosaurs" report should still be of use, since it's not affected by # of visits.

[Bill Wood]

Nick,

I'm wondering why you picked a report format to display these statistics. How about allowing us to sort our feeds based on the number of views/visits? Then we would be able to see our most-read feeds at the top of the newspaper, and sorted by relevance in the feed list (left hand) column.

- Bill

[Jason Grunstra]

Not sure if it's really a report, but more of an intelligent collection of feeds. Today for example I had at least 20 different feeds mentioning the video iPod.

So if there was a way for FeedDemon to do what Google News does and give me a quick overview from all my feeds what the top stories are, that would be handy.

[OSUKid7]

Nick,

Thanks for the fast response. :) The # of views would work great too. Perhaps it should only count as a "view" if the feed is displayed on the newspaper though? Otherwise, all of my feeds would have the same number of views, as I would cycle through my folders.

I like Bill's idea about sorting by most viewed. I've also wished I could reorder my feeds within a folder. Sorting alphabetically is nice, but some feeds just aren't important enough to be at the top.

Jason - that would be a great addition to FeedDemon. That also sounds very hard to implement. Perhaps that could be a FD 2.0 feature?

[Thomas Stache]

Jason's idea really sounds intriguing! In reality news outlets copy from each other so much, that it becomes annoying to read the same report or news over and over.

[Stuart]

In relation to Matthew's comments, maybe it would be useful to have a checkbox under the feeds' options to "exclude from dinosaur reports".

Also, it would be useful to have a report on podcasts, eg. most frequently and infrequently downloaded podcasts.

[Marcus]

I think it would be a very good thing, if the reports would be available as a Folder.
In addition I'd like to see reports that show a list of feeds that have been updated in a certain period (last hour, last day). That would make it even easier to see what has been updated.
Another report I'd like to see is about feeds that deal with my reading activity, i.e. feeds that I haven't read for some time or that I regulary read.

[Lisa]

Hi Nick,

I've been away for awhile and just wanted to say I just caught up on all your surgery, etc. Just wanted to let you know I'm thinking about you.

[Nick Bradbury]

Thanks, Lisa - welcome back :)

[Sean]

I couldn't agree more.

[Uma]

Great job!
This function can bring a lot of advantages to me.
Thanks, Nick.