Bloglines have added a new ‘hotkeys’ feature which allows users to scroll forwards and backwards through posts in their system from post to post or folder to folder with a keystroke.
A word of warning however – don’t click ‘s’ or ‘f’ unless you really do want to go to the next folder because it will open the folder/subfolder and mark all of the posts ‘read’ as if you’d manually opened them. I accidentally hit ‘f’ this afternoon and was forced to read the contents of a folder when I wasn’t really ready to – otherwise I would have lost the 450 unread entries (and no I didn’t feel like scrolling through them all and ticking ‘keep new’.
I’m also paranoid I’m going to hit the ‘A’ key by accident.
I wonder if there is an option to turn this feature off – it could be a disaster waiting to happen.
The issue of losing posts if you click on a folder is irritating, but you can use the “Display items within the last…” drop down menu at the end of the main page to reload articles from a specified time period. It does mean that you have to know what you’ve already read, but if it’s a regular feed or search, that shouldn’t be too difficult. It might not always work, but it’s helped me out when I’ve accidentally clicked, or realised I wanted to go back to an article.
I think I’ll stick to my mouse, though. :)
I use bloglines all the time .. my biggest peave is that it limits unread posts to 200 … I have lots of search queries but, only look at them periodically. If I forget about it for an extended period of time it stops adding the new posts, and stops at 200 .. (instead of adding new posts and dropping off the old posts) // at least, that’s what it seems to be doing with me.
As for clicking the box to keep as “New” .. yes – it’s very annoying at times because it keeps refreshing the left side when I put one tick in a box on the right side. I don’t know why they bothered to add the hotkey “R” to refresh the left side when all you have to do is tick any box … I won’t be using the hotkeys anyway.
I noticed the 200 limit, though I could sometimes brinig it up-ro-date by clearing it and then asking for the last, say, week’s worth of posts.
Also, sometimes Bloglines doesn’t seem to update feeds in the left-hand window, but when you click on them, it brings up new posts. Not sure why. Most work, some don’t (mainly ones aggregated from places like Topix.net and Feedster). So now for topics I need info on I click on them daily regardless of whether it says there are new articles. Most odd.
yeah bloglines isn’t the most user friendly interface. it sorta annoys me too. theres things they could do much more simply, like say, posts not dissappearing when you view them, but simply just changing their status as “new”. Like email or something.
[…] Then I see a post from Darren at problogger that tells me it’s not the only change bloglines have made. We also have keyboard shortcuts. […]
One thing that is probably very minor but has always irritated me: if you click the box to keep a post unread to read it later or whatever, your entire reading list on the left-hand column shifts and goes up to the top. I have around 150 feeds that I read every day, and it’s hard to remember where I was when this happens!!
Minor, yes, but irritating.
Don’t be afraid of hitting “A”… it’s capitalized in the hotkey list for a reason. You have to actually hit shift-a for it to open up all of your unread items, so an accidental single keypress won’t mess you up.
Good point Brad.
I would feel more comfortable being able to switch off the ‘f’ and ‘s’ keys though which don’t seem to be caps keystrokes.