RSS, or Really? Syndication Sucks
Posted on | December 7, 2010 | No Comments
I have a hundred and twenty nine RSS feeds in my Google Reader. Pruned from some hundred and fifty I had about half an hour ago. I’m still working on paring down the list… but even then, I feel obliged to keep some of them because the content they have (when I bother to read them) is damn good. The only feeds I’ve managed to prune so far are included in this list:
- They haven’t posted in a while
- The blog has shut down
- The title sucked
That criteria is somewhat friendly to bloggers since two of the three mean that the blogger won’t actually care that I’m no longer an avid reader of their musings. Not that I think that people who write blogs watch their reader counts go up and down like that, but come on, I still haven’t unfriended anyone on Facebook JUST IN CASE they’d notice. Someone once told me I’m too nice.
Anyway, back to the feeding frenzy. Google likes you to tag your feeds to aid in organisation, and you can have multiple tags for a feed, but only one folder. However, a folder IS a tag. It took me a while to realise this back when I was a feed-reading newbie, so I have a bunch of double-tagged feeds that are in a single folder. The next thing I’ve done is prune off all the tags I don’t use, such as “read me later”. What a dumb idea that was, Phoebe! That’s reduced my tag count from about eighteen to twelve. However my reading trend says that I usually only read about two of those tags, so the next, major step is to remove the other 10 tags and create two or three larger folders that don’t sort on category, but rather, how interested I am in their content. I think I got this idea from somewhere (probably a post on a blog that I had in my RSS feed). The goal is to have a couple of categories, like:
- I will read this ASAP
- I will read this when I have time
- I will probably read this (if categories 1. and 2. are empty)
- I won’t read this.
The idea behind this is to actively monitor what I’m reading and move things between the four categories as I need. I’ll initially sort them the way I think I read them – it’s pretty easy working out what’s in Category #1! – and then I will move feeds down or up as I notice myself reading them more. Once a feed has been in category 4 for a while I will purge the whole tag/folder. I’ll report back (hopefully) in a couple of months when hopefully my feed list has been cleaned up!
How do you manage your RSS feeds? Do you use Google Reader or some other tool? Do you use folders/tags or not at all?
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