NewsBlur, created by Samuel Clay, is an open-source RSS feed reader, offering an intelligent way to find stories you like and those you do not. NewsBlur automatically classifies every story based on the state of user editable intelligence classifiers. There are three types of possible classifications:

- negative classification - highlighted with red
- neutral classification - highlighted with orange
- positive classification - highlighted with green

# Feeds and folders

After a successful account creation the list of subscribed feeds is empty, however there are two special feeds that will be instantly visible. The Everything feed, unlike the regular feeds, contains stories from multiple feeds which are not read yet. If there are no unread stories at all, this feed is empty. The Saved stories feed contains the stories which are marked as saved. It's a useful feature in cases when you find an interesting story but you don't want or can't read it instantly. The Saved stories feed allows you to find these stories easily at a later time.

Feeds can be either added directly to the list of subscriptions or they can be organized hierarchically into folders. To add a new feed or to add a new folder press the '+' icon on the toolbar. New feeds and folders are always added to the folder that is currently visible in the view. A new feed can be added by either entering the full address of the feed, or by entering just search terms describing the feed. In the later case you'll get a list of suggestions from NewsBlur, select the one that you think is the best match and press the Add button. To add a new folder, just enter the new folder's name and press the Add button.

Existing feeds and folders can be modified and reorganized in a number of ways. These operations can be reached from the main menu or from the context menu of feed and folder items. An item's name can be modified by selecting the Rename item from the menu. Enter a new name for the item and press the Rename button. To delete an item, just select the Delete menu item. To modify the position of a feed or a folder item in the folder hierarchy select the Move to menu item, and a folder from the list of the available options. An item can be moved to any folder, except to it's current parent folder and to any of it's child folders.

# Stories

The number of unread stories for every feed in the current folder or for the current feed in the view is displayed in the top left corner of the page header, and also separately for every item in the list. If there are no unread stories, no unread count is displayed. The number of unread stories are displayed separately for every classification. The number of neutrally classified stories are marked with orange color, the number of negatively classified or disliked stories is marked with red and the number of positively classified stories or the stories you might like is marked with green color.

The stories of a particular feed can be viewed by entering the feed. If you enter a feed the list of stories is initially empty until the first batch of stories is loaded. Whenever the app loads a new batch of stories, a wait indicator is displayed in the page header. Whenever new stories for the given feed appear, they are automatically loaded and prepended to the list of stories. The contents of the stories are cached to speed up the browsing of feeds. The number of stories that are allowed to be cached can be adjusted in the settings of WebFeeds. The Everything feed is an exception. Due to the way NewsBlur updates feeds, stories in the Everything feed can't be reliably cached. The stories in this feed are just partially updated, new stories are loaded whenever they appear, but unread stories can also appear with older dates. So whenever you want to make a complete update of the list of unread stories, press the refresh button in the toolbar.

The classification of stories in a feed is indicated with horizontal lines on the left side of the story items with the same colors as the number of unread stories are marked. Unread stories are marked with brighter colors, the stories that are already read are marked with dimmer colors. If a story is saved, the story item is marked with a star.

In the feed view stories can be filtered by their classification. The current filter in use is indicated by the colors of the count bubble in the page header. The classification of hidden stories are highlighted with gray color instead of their original highlight color like red or orange. The filtering method can be changed by pressing the page header and selecting a different filter.

To view the contents of a story press the story item in the list. To view the next or previous story in the feed swipe right or left. Stories can be saved or unsaved by pressing the star icon in the toolbar. Stories can be shared with any of your accounts which allows sharing of links, by pressing the share button on the toolbar. Read stories can also be marked as unread from the menu.

To mark every story of a single or multiple feeds as read, press the check mark button in the toolbar. When it's pressed inside a feed every story of the current feed will be marked as read, pressing it inside a folder will mark every story of the current folder's child feeds as read, pressing it in the root folder of NewsBlur or in the Everything feed will mark every story in every feed as read.

# Intelligence trainer

The classifications of existing and future stories are determined by the state of intelligence classifiers of their feeds. Intelligence classifiers can be modified by opening the Intelligence trainer from the menu. When opened inside a feed every classifier of the current feed is displayed, when opened inside a story only the classifiers related to the current story are displayed. Three types of classifiers are available:

- Title classifiers - affect the classification of stories which title contains the text of the classifier.
- Author classifiers - affect the classification of stories with the given author.
- Tag classifiers - affect the classification of stories marked with the given tag.
- Feed classifiers - affect every story related to the given feed.

As mentioned earlier, classifiers can take three values, negative, neutral and positive. To change the value of a classifier press the dislike button on it's left to give it a negative, press it in the center to give it a neutral or press the like button on it's right to give it a positive value. The actual classification of a story is determined by the following rules:

1. if there is at least one title, author or tag classifier with a positive value related to the given story, it's classification is positive
2. if there is at least one title, author or tag classifier with a negative value related to the given story, it's classification is negative
3. if there are no title, author or tag classifiers with a positive or negative value related to the given story, it's classification is equal to the value of the feed classifier.