Nerve Endings Firing Away

[via Lifehacker]. Google Reader finally added a feature that I have been wishing for months or even years. Now you can mark items that older than a day or a week or even two weeks as Read. If you have a significant amount of subscribed feeds in your Reader list, the unread items can pile up pretty quick especially if you are reading prolific bloggers (are any still left since Twitter distracted us?). The earlier solution was to mark ALL items as read and start over. Especially if you are coming back from a vacation and faced with a 1000+ count (I use a GReader feature that hides my unread count). Although that may be the sensible thing to do, you may just miss out on interesting posts made in the recent past that you don’t want to ‘mark as read’.

I searched everywhere for a plugin or an extension that did this for me and even suggested it to Google via email and Twitter so I’m glad Google has finally incorporated it. Now if I may sound greedy and suggest that they let us also choose the duration of how far back can we go either in terms of days or hours. To be honest, I’ve not opened my Google Reader in more than a month now and have been slacking off on DesiPundit as well (apart from Friday Photo which I merely do the posting and Arun & Anil do the actual work of photo selection). But this feature now gives me enough motivation to renew my blog reading habits. Also, now that I’ve a MacBook Pro, I now use NetNewsWire as my desktop feed reader when I’m at home. I love its interface and usability. Best of all, it syncs with Google Reader.

Have you been reading blogs still or spend your time mostly on Twitter?