How do you browse your feeds? Lately, I've been scanning my email newsletters, and if an interesting website pops up, I've added their feed to my Bloglines account. It allows me to get rid of a lot of email. But something crappy happened, due to the proximity in Bloglines of the "Add" link and the "xxx feeds" link.

Last night, I clicked the wrong link, and in the blink of an eye, all of my unread feed items - all 3,000+ of them, disappeared, with no way to undo them wholesale. A week of research in building feed grazing list was almost for naught.

I say almost because I still have the feeds and can track and read future articles when they appear. But even though I'd culled my list of 9000+ items to 3000+, I actually wanted to read those 3000 items. Or most of them anyway. I can still go to each feed and refresh each feed back a certain amount of time. Except I now have over 340 feeds (despite my culling a few days ago), and Bloglines only refreshes one feed at a time.

Que sera sera. Hopefully, Bloglines will remedy this. If not, there are still the new items. Which got me to thinking, how long will it now take me to read my webscription items?

A quick glance at the total number of unread items, after obliterating my list, shows that I have over 470 items. At 10 seconds each, that's about 1.25 hours. But if I want to read something in detail and ponder the ideas, it might take me 3-5 minutes. Granted, I'd not be reading all 470 in detail, but even 100 items would take me the better part of a business day. So, I either learn to read faster, or be more selective.

From the publisher's side of things, consider carefully what fonts you choose. My own sites have a wide variety of fonts, which is a mistake that I'm trying to correct. You cannot help how your text appears in a feed reader or aggregator, but you can on your site. And if the reading experience in an aggregator is better than on your site, how do you think readers are going to browse your content?