Adjusting Feeds Settings for Your Reading Style
February 16, 2009 — Mike (admin)We have heard a bunch of people saying that Feeds gets out of sync with Google Reader the past few weeks. In 99% of cases this is just a case of the settings not matching your reading style. With this post we hope to clear up what settings should be used for your particular use case.
Speed of Syncing is my Priority – Set the ‘Interval to Back Sync’ to ‘Never’ and ‘Refresh Feed Items’ to 5 minutes. This is the fastest way to get your feed items but it sacrifices some accuracy in read/unread items. If the ‘Interval to Back Sync’ is never, Feeds will never fetch an item more than once. This means that if you open Feeds and download some items then read those same items in Reader, Feeds will not know about it.
Accurate Syncing of Read/Unread is my Priority – Set the ’Interval to Back Sync’ to ’1 Day’ and ‘Refresh Feed Items’ to 5 minutes. This will slow down your syncing (especially if you have a lot of feeds) but it will be sure do grab the last day’s worth of items from Reader. This setting is for users who open Feeds a few times a day but don’t really get through all of their feeds while using Feeds.
Balance of Fast Syncing and Accuracy of Read/Unread Status – This is where most users will be. You want Feeds to sync pretty fast and you want the read/unread status to stay pretty much in sync. Let’s break this down into how often you open Feeds:
- Once per day: Set the ’Interval to Back Sync’ to ‘Never’. You won’t need to backsync if you only open Feeds once per day.
- Every few hours: Set the ’Interval to Back Sync’ to about 2 or 3 hours.
- Pretty Often: Set the ’Interval to Back Sync’ to 30 minutes to keep syncs nice and fast.
Things to consider in choosing your settings:
- If you often open Feeds and don’t go through all of your items you need to set the ’Interval to Back Sync’ to approximately the time between launches of Feeds
- If you find that Feeds shows unread items on the main screen but you don’t see any unread items in the feed itself that is an indicator that you need to set the ‘Refresh Feed Items’ to a lower interval. Feeds will not resync on every startup for performance and battery life reasons. You can also manually refresh any single feed by pressing the refresh button while in the feed list. This will take varying amounts of time based on your ’Interval to Back Sync’ setting and how long it has been since the last sync. If new items are present (and they probably will be if your unread feed count showing and there are no unread items present) you will see a status message on the top of the screen and the new items will appear.
What happens when I open Feeds?
This varies greatly depending on your settings. In just about all cases, Feeds will log into Google Reader and fetch your feed list and unread counts first. If you have the ’Refresh Interval’ setting at ‘Manual’, Feeds will NOT download any items so your unread counts will almost certainly be out of sync. If your ‘Refresh Interval’ is set to a higher interval than the last time you opened Feeds your feed items will get synced and you will see an indication of this on the bottom of the main feed screen. First Feeds will grab your reading list while displaying the ‘Syncing: All Items’ text. Once it finishes grabbing all of your items it will refresh your starred and shared items. As soon as all of the data is synced ready to be read, your feed item counts will show up on the main screen.
I hope this post helps out some of the folks who were having the feed items out of sync issue. As you can see, while Feeds looks pretty simple on the outside there is a lot going on under the hood. We didn’t want to reveal too much of the underlying mechanisms here so as not to bore you to sleep. We just wanted you to know enough of what is happening to get your settings straight and find out what works for you.
And now for a real world example. I open Feeds (when not testing) about 4 – 5 times per day. In between those times I open Reader here and there. I always go through all of my unread items each time I open Feeds or use Reader. When I am done, there are never items left unread. I star, tag or InstaPaper the items I am interested in. My settings are: ’Refresh Interval’ ’5 Minutes’ and ‘Interval to Back Sync’ ’30 minutes’. The only reason I leave back syncing at 30 minutes is for those rare occasions when I don’t get to finish reading my feeds and then go onto Reader and finish up there.
Today I tried to switch from regular feeds to Reader integration and maybe I’m just not using it right. I got it to sync and it even shows unread counts for each feed but when I drill in there are no items. I have to hit the refresh inside that feed to get the items to load which seems wrong.
@John, what is your refresh interval set to? How many feeds do you have? Oftentimes, the first time you use Reader integration you need to press the sync button on the main feed list once or twice (depending on how many feeds you have). This will get Feeds caught up with Reader and then it will take care of itself from there. Also, if you just use Feeds normally, it will catch up after a few times running as long as syncing isn’t set to manual.
Mike
I think it’s caught up now. The problem seemed to be one of indicating what was happening at the start. It wasn’t clear that more loading was happening in the background even after the counts were displayed.
It would be nice if we could get rid of some of the icons at the top like share, instapaper, and tag. I’m sure quite a few people won’t use one or more and I’ve already hit other icons by accident while trying to star.
How come there’s no All Unread Items at the root and folder levels like there was for the non-Reader version?
@John, we are with you on getting rid of the icons. There is a change in the works to put only the most used icons up there and tuck the others away. The way all unread works with Google Reader is a bit different. There is a setting to show only unread items. When that is on, all of your feeds will display only unread items including the ‘All Items’ section on the feed list of the Reader integration.
Mike
Hi Mike, first I just want to say I’m blown away by your support in these comment threads. You guys are doing a great job and are clearly listening to your users and it’s creating an amazing app that is able to be incredibly fast by default AND allow users to slow it down to get their perfect balance of features and speed.
In terms of reading habits though there’s one thing that I haven’t seen mentioned and is very important to me: chronological sorting. In Reader you can set a feed to show ‘older items first’. I pretty much *always* set this to be older first, to the point where I requested a global “assume older first for all new feeds” setting from Google. Unfortunately Feeds doesn’t respect this setting and just gets the newer posts.
I’m not sure if you considered it already and were stymied by the API somehow, but I think it would be a hugely valuable addition to Feeds to support the setting (or even allow it to be changed for a feed within the UI, a boy can dream right?). I’ve always felt that oldest first was the best way to read feeds (especially rarely updated ones) and even just the effect of having oldest at the top (if that’s what you want) is important to a smooth reading experience.
There’s also the fact that for people who want to read everything and don’t ‘mark all as read’ (something I dont’ do, i’d rather have huge unread numbers) end up with the previously identified problems of new items being below all the older ones and hard to find in the UI. Sure they can set it to ‘show only unread’, but as stated that slows down the app AND they lose access to the previously-read items, which isn’t ideal.
For people who just want to make sure they’ve read everything respecting the ‘oder items first’ setting will solve several issues at once and bring your app a lot closer to being a full Google Reader experience. Hopefully it’s not impossible and thanks again for considering this request and making such a wildly awesome app.
p.s. WordPress is my trade. You can change your name to show as ‘Mike (admin)’ or something like that if you want from your personal profile options in the admin section.
@jeremeyclarke, thanks for the feedback. We do our best to try to keep all of our users happy here. Adding a sort order for your feeds wouldn’t be all that difficult. Like all Feeds feature requests if we hear it enough times it will get moved higher up on the to-do list so if anyone else likes to read their RSS feeds upside down feel free to comment.
Mike
Speaking of those icons, I see them only the first time I drill down during a session. When I select another item, they are gone.
I am looking forward to the next release. I check the App Store update section frequently.
Thanks for the advice in this post.
Today they are back consistently.
I also like that idea of feed sort order. It does make sense.
How come there is no item count for starred items?
Add my vote for chronological sorting. This is a must for those of us that use Feeds to read web-comics (Dilbert, CNTL-ALT-DELETE, etc.).
By the way, is there a way to un-star an article from within Feeds? I’ve search and searched and cannot find a way. Thanks.
Another vote for older first.
Ironically, it’s following these very comments that makes that so desirable for me, since comments are often responses to prior comments. As it is, I scroll to the bottom and go backward.
Roddy
I just added a new setting that lets you sort by oldest first or newest first. It will default to newest first. After playing around with it for a bit I can’t say I like it but to each his own. I guess if you are set to show only unread items it will be nice. I also added a new choice to the ‘items per feed’ setting. You can now choose to only keep 50 items per feed. If you decide to go upside down I figured you may want to only have 50 items to go through.
Mike
Thanks for the 50 feed setting Mike. Was going to suggest that once things settle down
Checking UK appstore every 5 mins everyday for apple to publish that bugfix update!
Regards
Thanks for the radically awesome turnaround Mike! I bet any feed you’ve been reading newest-first will look like a total mess if you turn it around, but if you’ve been reading the tail of a given feed for awhile all teh posts you see will be unread except the ones you just read.
Can’t wait for the update!
Requests:
* chronological sorting (oldest to newest) – currently I have to scroll down then arrow up
* unread count visible in reading screen — for everything
* Interval to back sync setting – am I crazy – where is this? iphone > settings?
* shrink the top nav and bottom menu bars or make them disappear then avail with a tap – I’d like more space to read, esp. when using large font.
* medium font?
* white font on black? I like this feature in stanza
Question: Why don’t some photos download? I have another RSS iphone app that works with Google Reader and that downloads photos on some articles during sync for me & are avail offline. With Feeds I only get photos when I’m online. I don’t think it’s a google reader issue b/c I’m able to get the same photos on a different RSS iphone app.
@LMV, chronological sorting is available in the settings. Go to your iPhones Springboard (desktop) and open the Settings application. You will see an entry for Feeds with all the settings. Photos at this time do now download to your device for offline viewing. This is a feature we have on our to-do list so expect it at some point in the future. Thank you for your suggestions.