Can I stop Google Reader from forgetting old items?

Question

It seems that Google Reader automatically deletes items older than about a month, even if they're unread. Or at least it no longer shows them as unread.

It technically makes sense as it calls them "new items" not "unread items". Can I change this behaviour and make it keep showing old unread items as new?

There are some low volume sites like LessWrong with long, complex, and not urgent articles which I don't read quickly after publication, but only occasionally given free time, and it's hard to use Google Reader to track them.

Alternatively is there any way to fool Google Reader into thinking such items are more recent than they are, perhaps by some Yahoo Pipes tricks?

Answer 1

There's no official way to stop GReader marking old items as read:

We only calculate unread counts for items less than 30 days old, or the last 10,000 items, whichever comes first. ... [The items] will still be there, but we won't show them as unread. This is standard behavior in Reader - if you want to save items for a longer period of time, we still recommend tagging or starring them.

• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-reader-troubleshoot/dBPKIgBAnbA/Xpclhvd1CD8J

Another workaround from Google is to "sort feeds by oldest first and show all items (using the all/new items toggle at the top of the screen) to get at old unread items in the feed."

• http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/reader/thread?tid=6f3cc6f5e47e3a2b&hl=en

Answer 2

Just as Google says, give a tag like 'unread' to all items you are going to read later, and press gt to select the 'unread' tag, done.

Once read, change the tag from 'unread' to 'read' to keep a record of what you have read.