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250 feeds, neatly organized

In honor of subscribing to my 250th RSS/Atom feed today, I sorted my feeds into groups in NetNewsWire. The flat scrolling list was breaking down pretty badly at this size.

250 feeds, neatly organized

Sorting the feeds was a lot more effort than I expected, so I just finished submitting a bunch of bugs and feature requests (1 2 3 4 5 6, and some for the bug tracker itself: 7 8). Phew. Certainly, I hope 2.1 (or 2.5, or 3.0…) improves the process, but thankfully I won’t be having to sort everything from scratch ever again.

Some interesting tradeoffs in grouping feeds, which I hadn’t thought about before:

Only unread posts are shown for grouped feeds. This is rather nice, because normally you don’t care about the read posts.

There are several feeds (Wired News, RSS Weather, the New York Times, and some Trac feeds of fast-changing apps like Adium) which I hardly ever read; I typically scan the article titles, click something if it looks good, and otherwise hit “k” to mark everything as read and continue on my merry way. I’ve kept the weather feed ungrouped for this reason. You can’t do this when you’re reading an entire group of feeds; “k” will mark the entire group worth of articles as read.

My group titles are shorter than typical feed titles, so I can narrow the subscriptions list, and finally have more room for multiple columns in the news items table (to, among other things, display the selected source). However, with the “+” and gear buttons at the bottom of the list, many of the status messages which live at the bottom right get cut off.

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