Greg: Yeah, you read a lot more blogs that I do ... an edge case for sure

One of the things I really enjoy about your posts is the "other" stuff, the stuff outside of my usual news bubble that I discover from your posts...

So no, I'd not use it (though I think the idea and tech is cool but with how many feeds I read, what I do with them, etc, I might be an edge case... ;)

Yaron: Hmmm, you have a good point. I'm now thinking the best thing todo may be a way to use a bit flag ... so a page that you can configure a filter that will be a bit flag enum like number to hold the inclusion or exclusion filter instead of specifying each section. Could even have a filter mode that would be inclusion or exclusion - on the backend its not that big of a deal to switch between the two. Guess I need to think about it a bit more. Thank you for your feedback!

I don't think that just because someone isn't interested in all of the sections it necessarily (or even just likely) implies that they also won't be interested in any new section. That's definitely not the situation in my case, but then again I'm not statistics, so I can't really say in either way whether it's the common attitude or not.

About the verbosity of the syntax, that would on what percentage of the sections the average user will want. If more people are interested in just 1-2 sections then you're right that exclusions will be more verbose, but if more people are interested in most sections except 1-2, then the inclusion syntax is more verbose, no?

How to tell which is the actual case, well, I really don't know before trying, unless enough people commenting here will say. In my specific case I do want most sections, so exclusion will also be less verbose.

Yaron: you have a point, but I think having an exclusion filter syntax is too verbose for that edge case. I'm sure I will add sections (especially temporary sections - like TechEd or PDC or something like that) ... but I think if you want to get those - then the filtered listing will not be what you want. I may change my mind ... but that is what i'm thinking right now. Thanks for pointing it out though.

That would be a good idea, as I do find myself usually sticking to just some of the sections and ignoring the rest. But:
What would be the behavior if you decide in the future to add a new section? In a feed filtered by inclusion criteria this will be completely missed unless you "spam" these sections with a notification of change over a long duration. So maybe it will be a good idea to allow filtering by excluding sections instead of by including them. That way any changes in the way you organize sections will not get accidentally lost, any new section will just start to show up and remain if not then also excluded...

Neal: Yeah, I actually have a days = 7 as a default currently. Do you think just a day count from the current day is sufficient? Until I get into the searching functionality, I probably won't add start/end date ranges.

Richard: Filtered weekly - I actually have something like that in mind too ... more on that soon. I totally agree - though sometimes I want to see the last 7 days (links only - nix the headings) for the Career section, etc.

Franky - thanks for the comment. I suspect that alot of people are of the same opinion.

Hi Jason,I think it would be awesome.
Do you think it is possible to add a datetime frame as well?

I read Interesting Finds pretty much every day. The list is short enough that a quick scan is all I need. If I filtered this, I might miss something from a "less interesting section"

A filtered weekly summary would be more useful. I could then scan the 3-ish sections I usually find most useful to make sure I hadn't missed anything.

Or you could leave it as-is - it would still be one of first sites I visit each day!

Thanks for all your work putting the links together.

Richard Gardiner

I prefer complete version, because sometime I will found a good post that is not in my usual fields of interest.
But this is just my two cents...