If you’ve been reading feeds for a while, chances are you’ve experienced feed overload. It happens to the best of us. Perhaps we take a break for a day or two, and when we come back to our aggregator we find hundreds of unread items waiting for us.
Even though we don’t have to read them all, we’re so used to email that it’s still stressful seeing so many unread items. That’s when it’s time to hit the panic button.
The "panic button" in this case is a feature I’ve added to the latest version of FeedDemon. FeedDemon will automatically detect when you’ve got a ton of unread items, and then offer to mark them (or a subset of them) as read. Here’s how it looks:
You can, of course, turn off the automatic detection and simply display the "panic button" whenever you like – but in my case, I like having it pop up and offer to mark stuff as read. And I don’t have to be concerned about missing some important thread just because I let the panic button mark items read, since I can still use FeedDemon’s "popular topics" to uncover the things people are talking about.