The loss of Google Reader as an RSS reader is a great shame but one thing that I am definitely going to miss is the trends page of Google Reader. This page provided data on what you've been reading and when you were reading it. Not only that but you could see what blogs you are following are active and which are not.

I use the last feature as a way of unsubscribing from blogs that are no longer active. Every month I look back to see which blogs were not active over the last three months and unsubscribe from them.

So now that Google Reader is being killed off, what do I do about the tracking of the blogs that I follow?

Due to the lack of products that I could find that do this, I thought about rolling my own RSS watch list so that I could see which blogs were not active over a given time period.

The idea is simple. You upload your OPML file of your RSS feeds and the watch list will monitor your feeds on a daily basis always checking to see when content on each blog feed was last posted. Alerts are emailed to you when a feed stops posting after a number of days that you specify.

A simple idea and one that I hope that I can build in the next few weeks.