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NewsBlur’s Intelligence Trainer has always had a simple rule: thumbs up beats thumbs down. If a story matches both a liked and a disliked classifier, the story shows up in Focus. That works well most of the time. But sometimes you run into a topic, author, or tag that you absolutely never want to see, and a regular thumbs down isn’t enough because a single thumbs up from another classifier overrides it.
Today I’m shipping two features that give the Intelligence Trainer more teeth: super dislikes that override any number of likes, and per-classifier notifications that ping you only when specific classifiers match.
Super dislikes are available to all users – free, Premium, Premium Archive, and Premium Pro. Folder and global scoping requires Premium Archive. Per-classifier notifications are exclusive to Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers.
Super dislikes
A super dislike is a new third state for classifiers. The regular thumbs down hides a story unless a thumbs up overrides it. The super dislike – shown as a double thumbs-down icon – overrides everything. If a story matches a super-disliked classifier, it’s hidden no matter how many positive classifiers it also matches.
The priority order is now: AI prompt classifiers > super dislike > thumbs up > thumbs down > feed score. This means super dislikes are the strongest manual signal you can set, second only to AI classifiers.
How to use it
In the Intelligence Trainer, every classifier pill now has three clickable icons on the right side: thumbs up, thumbs down, and the double thumbs-down for super dislike. Click the double thumbs-down to super-dislike a classifier. Click it again to remove the super dislike.
An explainer banner at the top of the trainer shows the priority chain so you always know how scoring works:
- Thumbs up beats any number of thumbs down
- Super thumbs down beats any number of thumbs up
Visual highlighting
Super-disliked classifiers are highlighted in a deeper crimson color, distinct from the regular red of a normal dislike. When you’re reading stories, you’ll see the same color treatment on matched titles, authors, tags, and text, with a small double thumbs-down icon inline so you can tell at a glance why a story was scored the way it was.
Works with scopes
Super dislikes work with all scope levels. Set a global super dislike on a topic like “sponsored” and it’s hidden across every feed. Set a folder-scoped super dislike on an author and they’re hidden in that folder regardless of positive training elsewhere. The same scoping rules from regular classifiers apply.
Per-classifier notifications
NewsBlur’s notifications have always been per-feed: turn them on and you get pinged on every new story. That’s fine for low-volume feeds, but not great for a high-volume feed where you only care about specific topics or authors. You end up choosing between too many notifications or none at all.
Now you can set notifications on individual classifiers. Every classifier pill in the Intelligence Trainer has a small bell icon. Hover over it and a popover appears with four channel toggles: Email, Web, iOS, and Android. Choose any combination, and when a new story matches that specific classifier, you get notified. Everything else in the feed stays quiet.
The bell icon lights up on classifiers with active notifications, so you can see at a glance which ones will ping you.
Works with scopes and regex
Classifier notifications respect the scope system. A notification on a global “breaking news” classifier fires when any feed publishes a matching story. A notification on a folder-scoped “earnings” classifier fires only for feeds in that folder.
Regex classifiers work too. If you have a regex title or text classifier, the notification evaluates the pattern with timeout protection on every new story.
Smart deduplication
If a story already triggered a feed-level notification on a channel, the classifier notification won’t duplicate it. Each story is sent once per channel, regardless of how many classifiers or feed rules it matches. There’s also a cap of 3 stories per classifier per update cycle, so a burst of matching stories won’t flood you.
Real-world examples
Breaking news alerts. Train “breaking” as a global title classifier, set it to notify via iOS and Email. You get a push notification whenever any feed publishes a story with “breaking” in the title.
Author tracking. Follow a journalist across multiple outlets. Train their name as a global author classifier with notifications, and you’ll know the moment they publish regardless of which feed it’s in.
Keyword monitoring. Use a regex classifier for a product name or company, scoped to your industry folder. Get an email when a matching story appears, without turning on notifications for every feed in that folder.
Availability
Super dislikes are available now on the web for all NewsBlur users. Per-classifier notifications are available on the web for Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers – all users can see the bell icon and popover, but toggling channels requires an Archive or Pro subscription.
If you have feedback or ideas for how to make these features better, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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If you’ve been following along lately, you know NewsBlur has been shipping feature after feature: story clustering, timed feed muting, the new site discovery panel, Ask AI, and more. I’m not slowing down, and I want people to know about it. If you’ve been using NewsBlur for years and still love it, tell people. Post about it on LinkedIn, on X, on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok, wherever you hang out online. Word of mouth is still king, and it’s how NewsBlur has always grown.
To make that more rewarding, I’m launching two new features today: referrals and gift subscriptions.
Earn free premium by referring friends
Every NewsBlur user now has a personal referral link. Share it with someone, and if they sign up and subscribe, you earn free time on your current tier. There’s no cap. Your next billing date gets pushed forward automatically, so you won’t be charged while you have referral credit.
Open the Refer & Gift modal from the Manage menu to find your link. Copy it and share it however you’d like. The modal also shows your referral stats: how many people have signed up through your link, how many have subscribed, and how many years of premium you’ve earned.
The credit scales proportionally based on your tier and what your referral subscribes to. If they subscribe to your tier or higher, you get a full free year. If they subscribe to a lower tier, you get proportional credit:
- Premium subscribers earn a full free year for every referral, regardless of what tier the referred person picks
- Premium Archive subscribers earn a free year when the referral subscribes to Archive or Pro, or 4 free months for a Premium referral
- Premium Pro subscribers earn 4 free months for an Archive referral, 2 free months for Premium, or 1 free month for Pro
The higher your tier, the more it pays to refer people to higher tiers. When a referral converts, you’ll get an email confirming your credit, and your subscription renewal date adjusts automatically. No action needed on your part.
Gift a subscription to anyone
The Gift tab lets you buy a NewsBlur subscription for someone else. Pick a tier, check out through Stripe, and you’ll get a shareable gift link. The recipient clicks the link, signs up or logs in, and their premium activates instantly.
Three tiers are available as gifts:
- Premium at $36/year
- Premium Archive at $99/year
- Premium Pro at $29/month
If the gift isn’t redeemed within 90 days, you get a full refund automatically. No need to contact support or remember to follow up.
How to access it
Open the Manage menu (the gear icon at the bottom of the feed list) and choose Refer & Gift. The modal has two tabs: Refer for your referral link and stats, and Gift for purchasing gift subscriptions.
Referrals and gift subscriptions are available now on the web for all NewsBlur users. If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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Every morning I open NewsBlur and scroll through hundreds of unread stories. Most days I can keep up. But some days I just want someone to tell me what matters. What’s the big story across my feeds? What are the long reads I should save for later? What matches the topics I’ve trained as interesting?
That’s the Daily Briefing. It reads your feeds, scores every story, and writes a personalized summary organized into sections that make sense for the way you read. It shows up as a feed in your sidebar, and you can have it emailed to you on a schedule you control.
How it works
Click “Daily Briefing” in your sidebar to open the briefing view. The first time, you’ll see an onboarding screen where you configure your preferences. Hit generate and NewsBlur does the rest: it scores your stories using a mix of trending read time, feed engagement, how often you read each feed, your classifier training, and recency, then generates a written summary of the top stories.
Each briefing is organized into sections:
- Top stories — The most important stories from your feeds, ranked by a weighted score of trending engagement, how often you read each feed, your classifier training, and recency
- From infrequent sites — Stories from feeds that rarely publish, so they don’t get buried under higher-volume feeds
- Long reads for later — Longer articles worth setting time aside for, detected by word count
- Based on your interests — Stories matching your trained topics, authors, and tags, with green classifier pills showing exactly why each story was selected
- Follow-ups — New posts from feeds where you recently read other stories
- Widely covered — Stories that appear across 3 or more of your feeds, using NewsBlur’s story clustering to group duplicates
You can enable or disable any of these sections, and drag to reorder them so your briefing is organized the way you want. If you only care about top stories and classifier matches, turn off the rest.
Custom keyword sections
On top of the built-in sections, you can add up to five custom keyword sections. Type a keyword or phrase and NewsBlur uses Elasticsearch to find matching stories across your feeds, then a dedicated section is written for them. If you always want a section about “climate change” or “Apple earnings,” just add the keyword and it appears in every briefing when there’s stories that match.
Three writing styles
Choose how you want your briefing written:
- Bullets — One-sentence summaries for each story, grouped by section. Quick to scan.
- Editorial — Narrative prose that explains why each story matters and connects them thematically. Each story’s feed favicon appears as an inline bullet.
- Headlines — Just the linked story titles, nothing else. The fastest way to scan.
Delivery schedule
Set the briefing to generate once, twice, or three times a day, or weekly. Each frequency has its own delivery slots:
- Daily: Pick morning, afternoon, or evening
- Twice daily: Morning plus your choice of afternoon or evening
- Three times daily: Morning, afternoon, and evening
- Weekly: Pick the day of the week
Briefings are delivered at fixed times in your local timezone: 8:30 AM, 12:30 PM, and 5:00 PM. Each briefing only includes stories from its lookback window, and stories never repeat across same-day briefings.
Notifications
Turn on email notifications for your briefing feed and the full summary lands in your inbox, complete with feed favicons, section icons, and classifier pills. The HTML is fully inlined for email clients, so it looks right in Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, and everywhere else.
You can also enable web, iOS, and Android push notifications if you’d rather get a ping than an email.
Choose your model
The briefing summary is written by a language model, and you can pick which one. The same model selector from Ask AI is available here, so you can use whichever model you prefer for writing style and quality.
Your data stays yours
The briefing uses your feed stories and classifier training to generate the summary. Story content is sent to the model provider you choose, but NewsBlur doesn’t use your data to train models or for any purpose beyond generating your briefing. The same privacy principles from Ask AI apply here.
Availability
The Daily Briefing is available now on the web for Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers. You can configure everything from the briefing view in the sidebar.
All users can open the Daily Briefing to see a preview with a handful of top stories. To unlock full briefings with all sections, custom keywords, and scheduled delivery, upgrade to Premium Archive.
If you have feedback or ideas for how to make the Daily Briefing better, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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If you subscribe to more than a handful of news feeds, you’ve hit this problem: a story breaks, and suddenly the same headline appears across five, ten, twenty of your subscriptions. You’re reading the same article over and over, just published by different outlets. Your river view fills up with duplicates, and the stories you haven’t read yet get buried.
Story clustering solves this. When NewsBlur detects that multiple feeds are covering the same story, it groups them together and shows you the highest-scoring version. The duplicates don’t disappear – they fold neatly underneath, so you can still see who else reported it and jump to their version if you want a different perspective.
How it works
In the story titles list, clustered stories show their sources directly below the representative story. Each source shows the feed’s favicon, feed name, story title, and how long ago it was published. Click any source to read that version instead.
When you open a clustered story, the detail view shows rich cards for each alternative source at the bottom. These cards include the feed icon, story title, a content preview, the article’s thumbnail image, author, and date. Click any card to jump to that version of the story.
Two layers of detection
Clustering uses two complementary approaches to catch duplicates:
Title matching is the fast, obvious check. NewsBlur normalizes story titles (lowercasing, stripping punctuation) and groups exact matches. But it also does fuzzy matching using significant-word overlap – so “Apple Announces New iPhone” and “Apple Reveals the New iPhone at WWDC” will still cluster together, even though the titles aren’t identical.
Semantic matching goes deeper. NewsBlur sends each story’s title to Elasticsearch’s more_like_this query, searching across all your subscribed feeds for articles covering the same topic. This catches stories that are about the same event but written with completely different headlines. The two layers are merged, so title matches and semantic matches combine into a single cluster.
Clustering runs automatically in the background every time a feed updates. Results are cached for 14 days, so clusters are ready instantly when you load your river.
Mark duplicates as read
When you read a clustered story, you can optionally have NewsBlur mark all the duplicates as read too. This is off by default – enable it in the feed options popover under “Story Clustering” or in Manage > Preferences > Stories.
There are two controls:
- Cluster related stories / Keep stories separate – Toggles clustering on or off. When enabled, duplicate stories are grouped in your river view. When disabled, every story appears individually as before.
- Mark all as read / Keep others unread – When you read the representative story, this controls whether the other stories in the cluster are automatically marked as read.
The same options are available in the global Preferences dialog under the Stories tab.
Availability
Story clustering is available to all NewsBlur users on the web. If a feed you subscribe to has cluster data, you’ll see grouped stories automatically – no configuration needed. Clustering is now enabled by default for all users, and can be toggled off or back on in your account Preferences.
Premium Archive subscribers get full control over clustering: choose between single-line and expanded preview styles, and automatically mark duplicate stories as read when you read the representative story.
Premium and free users see clustered stories on popular feeds where cluster data already exists. You’ll see clusters most often on widely-subscribed news feeds. To unlock clustering settings and get clustering across all your feeds, upgrade to Premium Archive.
If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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Sometimes a feed gets noisy for a while. An election cycle, a product launch, a conference week. You don’t want to unsubscribe because you’ll want it back eventually, but you also don’t want 200 unread stories piling up every day. Until now, muting was all or nothing: mute a feed and it stays muted until you remember to unmute it. Usually you forget.
Now you can mute a feed for a specific duration. Pick anywhere from 1 day to 1 year using the slider, or mute indefinitely the old-fashioned way. When the time’s up, NewsBlur automatically unmutes the feed the next time you load your feeds. No reminders to set, no manual cleanup.
Two ways to mute
Right-click any feed and choose “Mute this site.” Instead of muting immediately, a slider appears with two buttons: one to mute for a set duration, and one to mute indefinitely. Drag the slider to pick your duration, from 1 day all the way to 1 year with natural stops at 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, and so on.
The same controls are available in Site Settings. Open any feed’s settings and you’ll see a Mute section with a status message showing whether the feed is active, muted with a countdown, or muted indefinitely. The slider and buttons work the same way, and you can unmute at any time.
If a feed is on a timed mute, the right-click menu shows how much time is left next to the “Un-mute this site” option, so you always know when it’s coming back.
Auto-unmute
When a timed mute expires, NewsBlur unmutes the feed automatically the next time you open NewsBlur or refresh your feeds. There’s nothing to configure and no background job to wait for. Free accounts respect the 64-feed limit, so if you’re at the cap, the feed stays muted until you have room.
Timed muting is available now on the web for all NewsBlur users. If you have feedback or ideas, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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Not every website has an RSS feed. Some never did. Some had one years ago and quietly removed it. And some sites have content that updates regularly but was never structured as a feed in the first place: job boards, product listings, event calendars, changelog pages. Until now, if a site didn’t offer RSS, you were out of luck.
Web Feeds is a new feature that creates RSS feeds from any website. Point it at a URL, and NewsBlur analyzes the page structure, identifies the repeating content patterns, and generates extraction rules that turn the page into a live feed. It works on news sites, blogs, job boards, product pages, or really anything with a list of items that changes over time.
This is a huge feature and has been requested for years. I’m so thrilled to finally be able to offer it in a way that I feel comfortable with. Other solutions including having you select story titles on a re-hosted version of the page, but it was clumsy and error-prone. This way, we use LLMs to figure out what the story titles are likely to be, present the variations to you, and then let you decide what’s right. So much better!
How it works
Open the Add + Discover Sites page and click the Web Feed tab. Paste a URL and click Analyze. NewsBlur fetches the page, strips out navigation and boilerplate, and analyzes the HTML structure. Within a few seconds, you’ll see multiple extraction variants, each representing a different content pattern found on the page.
Progress updates stream in real-time while the analysis runs. NewsBlur typically finds 3-5 different extraction patterns on a page. The first variant is usually the main content (article list, blog posts, product grid), but sometimes the page has multiple distinct sections worth subscribing to. Each variant shows a label, a description of what it captures, and a preview of 3 extracted stories so you can see exactly what you’d get.
Select the variant that matches what you want to follow, pick a folder, and subscribe. NewsBlur will re-fetch and re-extract the page on a regular schedule, just like any other feed.
Story hints
Sometimes the initial best guess isn’t what you’re looking for. Maybe the page has a blog section and a job listings section, and you want the jobs. Click the Refine button and type a hint like “I’m looking for the job postings.” NewsBlur re-analyzes the page with your hint in mind and reorders the variants to prioritize what you described.
What gets extracted
For each story, NewsBlur extracts whatever it can find: title, link, content snippet, image, author, and date. Not every field will be available on every site, and that’s fine. At minimum you’ll get titles and links. The extraction uses XPath expressions, which means it’s precise and consistent across page refreshes as long as the site’s HTML structure stays the same.
When things change
Websites redesign. HTML structures shift. When NewsBlur detects that the extraction rules have stopped working (after 3 consecutive failures), the feed is flagged as needing re-analysis. You’ll see a feed exception indicator, and you can re-analyze the page with one click to generate updated extraction rules.
Use cases
Some examples of sites that work well with Web Feeds:
- Company blogs without RSS — Many corporate blogs dropped their RSS feeds years ago. Web Feeds brings them back.
- Job boards — Track new postings on a company’s careers page.
- Government sites — Follow press releases, meeting agendas, or public notices.
- Changelog pages — Monitor when a tool or service ships updates.
- Event listings — Keep tabs on upcoming concerts, conferences, or local events.
- Product pages — Watch for new arrivals or restocks on stores that don’t offer feeds.
Availability
Web Feeds are available to Premium Archive and Premium Pro subscribers. The ongoing feed fetching and extraction runs on NewsBlur’s servers like any other feed.
If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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This is a hefty redesign and rethinking of the NewsBlur iOS and Mac app. Every screen has been rethought, from the login page to the story detail to the intelligence trainer. This release adds full support for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS Tahoe, along with several features that were previously web-only: Discover Related Sites, Ask AI, the Dashboard, and Premium Pro.
Here’s what’s new:
iOS 26 and macOS Tahoe
NewsBlur is built for the latest Apple platforms. The toolbar is transparent and fades as you scroll. The column layout has been simplified to “feeds beside” or “feeds over” the story detail. On iPad, a new draggable divider lets you resize the feeds and stories columns, and the sidebar auto-collapses when space gets tight. On Mac, the sidebar auto-hides and trackpad swipe gestures work throughout the app.
The default theme is now Auto, so NewsBlur follows your system appearance out of the box. Dark mode correctly overrides the window style to stay consistent with whatever NewsBlur theme you’ve chosen.
A warmer sepia theme
The Sepia theme has been completely reworked with warmer tones that are easier on the eyes for long reading sessions. The theme selector itself has been rewritten across all menus, with improved contrast on the pill buttons so you can clearly see which theme is active.
Story titles pill bar
The top of the story list now has a pill bar with quick access to Discover, Options, Search, and Mark Read. The search bar slides in and out instead of fading, and the mark-read button has a wider tap target with an optional confirmation step.
Discover related sites
Discover Related Sites lets you find related feeds from any feed or folder. Tap the Discover button in the new story titles pill bar, browse what’s available, and try a feed before subscribing with a preview banner.
List and magazine views
Two new story layout options join the existing Grid view. List shows compact rows for scanning headlines quickly. Magazine shows taller rows with larger thumbnails, giving you a richer preview of each story without opening it. Switch between them from the story titles pill bar.
Dashboard
The Dashboard sits at the top of your feed list and shows stories from your favorite feeds, updated every five minutes. Add, remove, and rearrange feeds to build a personal front page that keeps you current throughout the day. It’s the first thing you see when you open the app, and it updates in the background so fresh stories are always waiting.
Redesigned login, preferences, and upgrade
The login screen now features animated Metal shader waves with a frosted glass card. Preferences have moved from the old InAppSettingsKit to a new native SwiftUI PreferencesView. The Premium upgrade screen has been redesigned to include Ask AI integration and the new Premium Pro tier.
Share, Trainer, and Ask AI dialogs are presented as swipeable sheets on iPhone with grabber handles, replacing the old full-screen modals. The sync indicator has moved from a large HUD to a subtle top-right nav bar dot.
Ask AI
Ask AI brings the same AI-powered Q&A from the web to your phone and Mac. Select a story, tap Ask AI, and ask questions about it. Summarize a long article in one sentence, get the backstory on a developing situation, or fact-check a claim. Pick from multiple AI models and keep the conversation going with follow-ups.
Push notifications with feed favicons
Push notifications now show your feed’s favicon alongside the notification using Communication Notifications. At a glance, you can tell which feed a story came from before you even open it.
Everything else
Beyond the headline features, this release includes a long list of improvements and fixes across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Improvements
- Pinch-to-zoom images to full-sized Quick Look preview in any story.
- Mark Story Read options: mark read on scroll, on selection, after an interval, or manually.
- Premium Pro tier added to the iOS upgrade dialog with higher limits.
- Custom feed and folder icons now supported on iOS.
- Unmute support for individual feeds.
- Collapse-all and expand-all button on All Site Stories.
- Modernized menu bar on Mac and iPad with keyboard shortcuts.
- Icons added to context menus on Mac and iPad.
- Redesigned story action buttons with modern styling.
- Text, URL, and regex classifiers added to the iOS Intelligence Trainer.
- Compact story title cells with equalized vertical spacing in list view.
- Fetching/offline banner moved from bottom overlay to top of story titles.
- Feed list search bar replaced with a compact text field.
- Scroll-to-hide toolbar synced with swipe-back gestures.
- Sidebar toggle buttons for showing and hiding the feed list.
- Redesigned Add Site as a SwiftUI half-height sheet with autocomplete.
- Story traverse bar and feed bar fade gradually as you scroll.
- Mac Catalyst: dismiss modals via overlay tap or Escape key.
- Mac Catalyst: trackpad swipe gesture support.
- Improved theme selector pill contrast for medium and light themes.
- Show toolbar when tapping status bar to scroll to top.
Fixes
- Fixed WebSocket disconnects from EIO4 protocol and session lifecycle issues.
- Fixed story width rendering wider than viewport on first load on iPhone.
- Fixed memory issues with PINCache cost limits.
- Fixed offline queue priority inversion.
- Fixed saved stories showing incorrect read/unread status.
- Fixed YouTube Error 153 with HTTPS and inlined resources.
- Fixed trainer popover showing empty content on first open.
- Fixed crashes with custom feed icons in story detail.
- Fixed blank statistics modal by adding missing JS globals.
- Fixed white flash and navbar color mismatch when opening stories in dark themes.
- Fixed sepia theme yellow tint on Mac Catalyst.
- Fixed (null) username and missing avatar when sharing on Mac Catalyst.
- Fixed Catalyst pill bar AppKit chrome artifacts.
- Fixed Mac traverse bar layout, highlights, and previous button state.
- Fixed Discover popover placement on Mac and iPad.
- Fixed mark-read pill confirmation.
- Fixed status bar color and liquid glass gradient boundary.
- Fixed stale collapsed folder unread counts on iPad.
- Fixed stale story responses when switching folders quickly on iPad.
- Fixed Mac Catalyst split divider limited to grab handle area.
NewsBlur for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS Tahoe is available now on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. If you have feedback or run into issues, I’d love to hear about it on the NewsBlur forum.
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NewsBlur has always been great at reading feeds. But finding new ones? That was mostly on you. The old “Add Site” dialog was a search box and not much else. If you already had a feed URL, it worked fine. If you were looking for something new to read, you were on your own.
The new Add + Discover Sites page changes that. It’s a full-page discovery experience with eight tabs covering YouTube channels, Reddit communities, podcasts, newsletters, Google News topics, trending sites, popular feeds, and of course the classic search-and-subscribe workflow. There are over 50,000 curated feeds to browse, all organized into dozens of categories and subcategories.
Eight ways to find feeds
The tab bar across the top gives you eight different lenses into the world of RSS:
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Search — The classic search bar, now with semantic search and autocomplete. Type a topic or URL and get instant suggestions. Below the search results you’ll find trending feeds ranked by a hybrid algorithm that combines subscription velocity, read engagement, and subscriber counts.
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Web Feed — Create RSS feeds from any website. This one gets its own blog post.
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Popular Sites — Thousands of curated RSS feeds organized into categories like Technology, Science, News, and Business. Each category has subcategories for drilling down further.
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YouTube — Over 2,000 verified YouTube channels converted to RSS feeds. Browse by category or search for specific channels. Subscribe and read YouTube in your feed reader the way it should be.
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Reddit — Nearly 6,000 real subreddits across 47 categories. From r/programming to r/sourdough, you can subscribe to any subreddit as an RSS feed.
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Newsletters — Newsletters from Substack, Medium, Ghost, Beehiiv, and other platforms. Platform pills let you filter by newsletter provider if you have a preference.
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Podcasts — Popular podcasts organized by genre. Search for shows or browse the curated collection.
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Google News — Eight preset topics (World, Business, Technology, Sports, and more) that create feeds from Google News. One click to subscribe.
Categories and subcategories
Most tabs are organized with a two-level taxonomy. Click a category pill at the top to filter, then drill into subcategories for more specific browsing. YouTube’s Technology category, for example, breaks down into Programming, AI & Machine Learning, Gadgets, and more.
The categories are consistent across tabs where it makes sense, so you can explore Technology feeds across YouTube, Reddit, Popular Sites, and Podcasts without having to rethink the navigation each time.
Grid view and list view
Every tab supports two viewing modes. Grid view shows feed cards with thumbnails, descriptions, subscriber counts, and freshness indicators. List view compresses things into a denser layout when you want to scan quickly.
A style popover in the top right lets you toggle between views. Your preference is saved per tab.
Try before you subscribe
Every feed card has a Try button that instantly fetches the feed and shows you the actual stories. No commitment, no subscribing. Just a quick look at what you’d get. If you like what you see, the subscribe button is right there with a folder picker.
A breadcrumb link at the top takes you back to where you were browsing when you’re done previewing.
The new Add Site popover
If you don’t need the full discovery page, the popover that appears when you click “+” in the sidebar has been redesigned too. It still has the quick URL input for when you have a feed address handy, but now it also shows freshness indicators and has buttons to jump into any of the discovery tabs.
Semantic search
The search tab uses Elasticsearch to find feeds by name with fuzzy matching. Type “cooking” and you’ll get cooking blogs, YouTube cooking channels, cooking subreddits, and cooking podcasts. It searches across all feed types, not just traditional RSS. If Elasticsearch doesn’t find anything, the search falls back to a database query so you’ll always get results.
Where all these feeds came from
Building the discovery page meant curating a lot of feeds. I wrote management commands to discover and verify channels, subreddits, podcasts, and newsletters from real sources. The collection includes over 2,000 YouTube channels, 6,600 subreddits, 7,300 newsletters, 32,000 podcasts, and 14,000 RSS feeds. Over 63,000 feeds in total, all real, verified, and categorized.
The Add + Discover Sites page is available now on the web for all users. If you have feedback or ideas for new categories, platforms, or features, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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A lot of the sites I subscribe to have audio and video embedded directly in the stories. Podcasts, YouTube channels, news clips. But playing them in NewsBlur has always been a bit awkward: you hit play on the native browser control, then if you scroll to the next story or switch feeds, the audio just stops. I wanted something that keeps playing while you keep reading.
So I built a persistent mini media player. It sits at the bottom of your screen and handles audio, video, and YouTube from any story. Play something and it stays with you as you navigate feeds, open folders, or scroll through stories.
How it works
When you open a story that contains audio, video, or a YouTube embed, you’ll see overlay buttons right on the media element: Play in Mini Media Player, Play Next, and Play Last. Click any of them and the mini player appears at the bottom of the screen. If you click the native play button on an audio or video element, it hands off to the mini player automatically.
The player has a three-row layout. The top row shows the feed favicon, feed name, and story title (click the title to scroll back to the story). The middle row is a full-width scrubber so you can seek precisely. The bottom row has playback controls: skip back, play/pause, skip forward, a time display, playback speed, and a volume slider that appears on hover.
Build a queue
The real power is the queue. As you’re reading through stories, you can add media to your queue with “Play Next” (inserts at the top) or “Play Last” (appends to the end). The queue shows up right below the player with a count of upcoming items. Drag items to reorder them, or remove items you’ve changed your mind about. When the current item finishes, the next one starts automatically.
Playback history
Switch from the “Up Next” tab to the “History” tab to see your last 10 played items. Each entry shows where you left off, so you can pick up a podcast episode right where you stopped. Click any history item to resume it.
Settings
Click the gear icon in the player to customize your experience:
- Skip back/forward: Choose how far to jump (5s, 10s, 15s, 30s, or 60s in each direction)
- Auto-play: Automatically play the next queued item when the current one finishes (on by default)
- Resume position: Remember where you left off in each episode (on by default)
- Show on load: Restore the player when you reload NewsBlur, so you can pick up right where you left off (on by default)
Synced across reloads
Your playback state, queue, history, and settings are all saved to your NewsBlur account. Reload the page and the player comes back with your queue intact and the current episode paused where you left it. Position data syncs in real time via WebSocket so there’s no lag.
Playback speed
Click the speed indicator (next to the time display) to cycle through speeds: 0.5x, 0.75x, 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 2x, and 3x. Your speed preference is saved and applied to the next item in your queue automatically.
The mini media player is available now on the web for all NewsBlur users. If you have feedback or ideas for how to make it better, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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Until now, the Intelligence Trainer was strictly per-feed. Train a title, author, or tag on one site and it only affected that site. If you wanted to hide a topic everywhere, you had to repeat that training on each feed. With a few feeds, that’s fine. With a hundred, it’s tedious. With five hundred, it’s a non-starter.
If you’re a Premium Archive subscriber, you can now set any classifier to apply globally across all your feeds, or scoped to a specific folder. Train “sponsored” as a dislike once, and it hides sponsored stories everywhere. Train “kubernetes” as a like in your Tech folder, and it highlights kubernetes stories across every feed in that folder without touching the rest of your subscriptions.
Three scope levels
Every classifier pill in the Intelligence Trainer now shows three small scope icons on the left: a feed icon, a folder icon, and a globe icon.
- Per Site (feed icon) — The default. The classifier only applies to the feed you’re training. This is how classifiers have always worked.
- Per Folder (folder icon) — The classifier applies to every feed in the same folder. If you later move the feed to a different folder, the classifier stays tied to the original folder.
- Global (globe icon) — The classifier applies to every feed you subscribe to.
Click any scope icon to switch. The active scope is highlighted, and a tooltip explains each level. Your choice is saved with the classifier.
Real-world examples
Hide a topic everywhere. Subscribe to lots of news feeds but never want to read about a recurring topic? Open the trainer on any feed, add the topic as a text or title classifier, thumbs-down it, and click the globe icon. Done — it’s hidden across all your feeds.
Focus on a topic within a folder. Have a “Tech” folder with 40 feeds? Train “machine learning” as a like with the folder scope, and every feed in that folder will surface machine learning stories in your Focus view. Your cooking and sports feeds stay untouched.
Dislike a prolific author. Some authors are syndicated across multiple sites. Instead of training the same author name on each feed, set it to global and it applies everywhere at once.
Manage Training scope filter
The Manage Training tab now includes a scope filter alongside the existing sentiment, type, and search filters. You can quickly see all your global classifiers, all your folder-scoped classifiers, or narrow down to just per-site training.
Each classifier pill in the Manage Training list also shows a small colored scope badge, so you can tell at a glance whether a classifier is site-level, folder-level, or global.
How scoping works under the hood
When NewsBlur scores a story, it checks all classifiers that apply to that story’s feed — including any folder-scoped classifiers for the feed’s folder and any global classifiers. The same “green always wins” rule applies: if a story matches both a liked global classifier and a disliked per-site classifier, the story is marked as Focus.
Scope controls work with all classifier types: titles, authors, tags, text, and URLs. They also work with regex classifiers.
Subscription tiers
Feature Tier Required Per-site classifiers (default) Free Global and folder-scoped classifiers Premium Archive Manage Training scope filter Premium Archive Global and folder-scoped classifiers are available now on the web. If you have feedback or ideas for improvements, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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