For the longest time, I’ve consumed most of my (non-Twitter) news via RSS feeds. RSS feeds are an incredibly convenient way of bringing different newsfeeds from different websites and informations sources together.

I’ve experimented with different types of RSS readers over the years, and my favorites have been Digg, Unread, and more recently, I’ve switched back to Reeder 4 after hating it for years. Reeder is quick, and its new redesign makes it a lot more intuitive to use. The only annoyance with Reeder, however, is the exceptionally slow initial setup time. When you install it on a new device, it parses through the entire history of every news source – often accumulating up to 40,000 stories. And until it’s done with this initial startup, which can sometimes take hours, you cannot refresh to find new news stories.

I don’t seem to be able to find a way to restrict Reeder’s searches of news sources (or more technically the RSS XML files) to the last [x] number of entries. I thought I’d write this up in case someone else has faced a similar issue and has found a fix.