I just got back from a long weekend at Zion National Park, and spent a few hours catching up on 'net reading. I started downloading email and saw that I had 260 messages coming. Ugh! Maybe I should take another vacation. 130 or so were SPAM, and were automatically shunted off to a junk mail folder. What a relief. 104 were from the Atom syntax email list--more than I'd have expected there. A few were notices about this and that which I deleted without reading, and the remaining handful were tech-support questions. Not as painful as the number 260 had led me to believe.

Next, I turned to the feed reader, which came up with about a hundred unread items. I made even quicker work of scanning those and reading a few that looked interesting.

In the back of my mind was a little voice whispering, reminding, nagging? No, I've gotten over feeling nagged by this voice. The voice said, "Maybe you should go to Slashdot to see the stories from Saturday, Sunday, and Monday that you missed." That's the thing about newsfeeds: when you go on vacation, you might miss something. Is that bad? Is it good? What can you do about it? Do you want to do anything about it?

If you subscribe to a newsfeed to keep apprised of critical information, that's bad. Unless you can go back and see what made its way through the feed while you were gone, you could miss something important. But if you're only reading for entertainment, or if the reading is useful, but not critical, it can be good. Unlike email, which sits there begging to be read till you've read it, newsfeed items go away if you ignore them long enough--at least they do if your feed reader is not polling for long enough--but if you're feed reader ever sees them, they probably loiter like emails till you chase them off.

Idea #1: Feed readers should give you the option of deleting unread items after a certain amount of time).

Idea #2: Feed readers should be hosted online so that they can keep polling while your computer is off (I know, some already are.)

Idea #3: Feeds should give you the option to load old items that have dropped off their ends.

Atom has a built in mechanism for addressing idea #3. If you look at the source of an Atom feed, you might see something like this:

<link rel="prev" ...

That's a link to the previous items from the feed.

Idea #4: If your feed reader has been off for a while, it should check whether each feed is entirely new since it last saw it, or whether any old items are still hanging around. If it's totally new, and the feed has a "prev" link, it should load it to get the things you missed.

Idea #5: Feed readers implementing idea #4 should let you specify how many old items to load before giving up on getting you caught up completely.

Enough for now. I need a vacation.