RSS Reader Feature Idea

It would be really nice to be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for a limited time.  There’s two reasons for this. Firstly so that you can subscribe to the comments RSS feed for a particular article you won’t to track the discussion for but then have it drop out of your feeds once the conversation dies down (this might be best implemented as auto-unsubscribe after x days of inactivity).

Secondly, so that you can try out a new blogger and see how they go for a week or two.  If they have some interesting stuff to say you choose to keep them around and if it’s boring you drop them from your RSS feeds.  This is probably a confirm subscription in x days kind of option.  It should be done in a passive way though so when there are feeds up for review a button lights up in the UI that I can click when I have time to review the list and decide which to toss and which to keep.  That way when I come across an article in a blog I don’t normally read I could put it on a trial subscription to see if there are any interesting follow-ups or if it was just a once off stroke of genius.  While I could do that now I quickly lose track of what I’m actually subscribed to and don’t have time to think about whether to unsubscribe from a feed while I’m flicking through the morning deluge of entries.

Oh and while I’m thinking of features – how about a strip duplicates feature?  There’s a few blogs that I get multiple times because they are syndicated into different places.  It would be nice if my RSS reader did an MD5 on the body of each entry and hid onces that were duplicates somehow.