How to optimize Feedly for speed

Martin Brinkmann
Mar 21, 2013
Updated • Mar 21, 2013
Internet
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If you are using Google Reader as your main RSS feed application you have probably started to evaluate other RSS readers to find the best suited alternative for you. The web-based and mobile reader Feedly seems to be a popular choice, considering that more than 500,000 Google Reader users made the switch to the service in the 48 hours after Google's announcement of its retirement. It is not clear how many of those users will stick with the service or decided to use another service as their main RSS feed reader.

The first thing that I noticed after joining Feedly was that it favored a newspaper style by default which may look pretty but is not really practicable if you are subscribed to hundreds of feeds and need to browse a thousand or so articles each day. The layout may work well if you are subscribed to a dozen feeds though.

I began to check out options to optimize Feedly for speed, to browse new RSS feed items in the least amount of time possible without skipping vital information in the process. I like to browse titles only for that as it speeds up the process significantly. I do not need excerpts or images for that anymore as it is slowing me down, and if something sounds interesting, I can still access those information with a click.

The magazine view displays a total of five posts on a 1920x1200 monitor in full screen mode.

feedly magazine view

And now look at the titles view mode instead and tell me which view mode you'd prefer if you'd have to browse more than a thousand posts per day.

feedly speed

To change the view mode, simply click on the settings icon at the top right and switch from Magazine to Titles.Note that you need to perform that operation for every folder that you have. You can however open the preferences and change the default layout from magazine to condensed.

While we are at it, you may want to switch to latest here in regards to the start screen to get a chronological listing of feeds on it with the newest items at the top.

Your layout will differ from the one you see on the screenshot above as I further enhanced it with the Readly userscript. The script makes several modifications to Feedly, including making the layout more compact to reduce the amount of white space, and using the full width of the browser window to display contents.

Another feature that you may like is the support for keyboard shortcuts. Just press ? while on Feedly to display the list of shortcuts on the screen.

You can tap on r to refresh the data, use gm or ga to display today's or the latest news items, use j and k or n and p to select the next or the previous article, m to mark as read, e to email and t to tweet about it.

A couple of things are missing that I'd like to see implemented in the future. It is not really that easy to mark an item as read. For that, you need to expand the title on the page, or use mark as read button at the top but that is marking all news items on the page as read.

It seems easier right now to open the first item on the page and browse through all items on that page using the j shortcut. I guess you can also just browse to the very end of the feed stream in one go and then use the mark all as read option to mark all items on that page as read.

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Comments

  1. ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
    Reply

    Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on August 4, 2012 at 7:57 pm
      Reply

      Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.

    2. Leonidas Burton said on September 4, 2023 at 4:51 am
      Reply

      I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
      http://www.google.com/saved

  2. VioletMoon said on August 16, 2023 at 5:26 pm
    Reply

    @Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!

  3. Karl said on August 17, 2023 at 10:36 pm
    Reply

    @Martin

    The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/

    Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.

  4. Anonymous said on August 25, 2023 at 11:44 am
    Reply

    Omg a badge!!!
    Some tangible reward lmao.

    It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.

  5. Scroogled said on August 25, 2023 at 10:57 pm
    Reply

    With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.

    1. lollmaoeven said on August 27, 2023 at 6:24 am
      Reply

      This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)

  6. El Duderino said on August 25, 2023 at 11:14 pm
    Reply

    Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.

    And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.

  7. John G. said on August 26, 2023 at 1:29 am
    Reply

    First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm

    For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[

  8. Kalmly said on August 26, 2023 at 4:42 pm
    Reply

    Yes. Please. Fix the comments.

  9. Kim Schmidt said on September 3, 2023 at 3:42 pm
    Reply

    With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.

    Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.

    The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.

    If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.

    And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.

  10. Anonymous said on September 28, 2023 at 8:19 am
    Reply

    When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?

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