See how active your feeds are

One of the more annoying things about subscribing to a lot of feeds is that you never quite know what you're getting into. You add a feed, it seems quiet, then suddenly it's posting five things a day and drowning out everything else.

The latest update adds a publishing activity graph to each feed's settings panel, a small bar chart showing how many articles that feed published each day over the last 30 days. At a glance you can see whether a feed is steady, bursty, or barely posting at all.

Why this matters for auto-discard

The graph was really built to make auto-discard more useful. Auto-discard lets you set an age limit on articles, anything older than N days gets quietly marked as read and cleared out of your queue. It's a way of keeping high-volume feeds from piling up indefinitely.

The problem before was that setting a sensible discard threshold felt like guesswork. Now you can see the actual publishing pattern before you decide. A feed that posts twice a week probably doesn't need aggressive discarding. One that posts fifteen times a day almost certainly does.

The graph also shows a marker for your current discard setting, so you can see how many of the last 30 days' articles would have survived. It makes the setting feel concrete rather than abstract.

Per-feed overrides

You've been able to set a global auto-discard threshold for a while. What's also possible, and worth knowing if you haven't used it, is overriding it per feed. The noisy tech news feed can discard after a week while the slow personal blog you love sits in your queue forever. The activity graph makes it much easier to decide which feeds deserve which treatment.