View Sections

A screenshot of the Layout tab in Edit View, showing the view section editor What are view sections? It's often useful to organize your RSS content from most read (blogs from friends, paid newsletters) to least read (general news headlines you skim), as discussed in this excellent Molly White blogpost. This can be difficult in a general-purpose reader, as this kind of system often necessitates multiple views for each kind of content you'd like to group – you might end up with views like "Important News" and "News Headlines" instead of one curated "News" view. View sections give you an additional tool to maintain that top-level grouping while having control of the internal organization. Some example use cases for view sections include: In a "News" view, surfacing specific publications or tags first and pushing more noisy or firehose-like feeds to the bottom In a "Subscriptions" view, highlighting a set of channels tagged "First" at the top and showing other less important or longform videos later In a "Music" view, splitting out news publications from music videos (e.g., separating a music criticism site's reviews from NPR Tiny Desk performances) Adding view sections View dialogs have been updated to separate view content from view display settings. Here's what editing view sections looks like in that "Display" tab: A screenshot of the Layout tab in Edit View, showing the view section editor Starting with this release, you can add sections to your views based on a given feed or tag. Drag and drop these sections to adjust their order. You can match any tag that exists on a feed in that view, regardless of if that tag has been explicitly added to the view or not. In addition, you can set a custom layout for each view section, or mirror the base view layout with Default. Some layout options you might consider are: In a "News" view, showing important items in a Large List layout while keeping headlines in a more compact, standard List layout. In a "Subscriptions" view, showing videos from your favorite channels in a Large Grid layout while keeping general subscriptions in a more traditional Grid layout In a "Music" view, showing music criticism sites in a list-style layout and performance videos in a grid-style layout (to better separate between the types of content) Additional features of view sections Each view section comes with a "Mark as read" button. Group commonly triaged or read content together to bulk archive it in one go. Hit f to mark a selected section as read, or Shift + F to mark all content in a view as read. View sections are persisted through OPML exports and imports. If you ever move off of the main serial instance to a self-hosted one or vice versa, your sections will transfer too. This should also work for other RSS readers, although Serial-specific concepts like layouts will not transfer. Other release changes Feeds can now be renamed Added a set of heuristics to determine if a feed doesn't supply full content in its RSS feed, making it easy to open that feed in the original site in the future Renamed "Watch Later" to "Saved" in the UI and updated icon Renamed "Read" to "Archived" in the UI and updated icon Updated "Save" shortcut from w to s Updated "Send to Instapaper" shortcut from s to Shift + s Improved cross-device sync and fixed edge cases Improved article scroll progress feature Added the ability to undo bulk "Mark as read" actions with z or by clicking "Undo" in a toast UI (#226)