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Too many RSS feeds? Put ’em on probation
Merlin Mann | Oct 14 2005
rethink(ip) - Controlling RSS Overload...Animal House Style Good idea for managing the RSS feeds you think you might be able to live without:
At a more byzantine stage, I did something kind of similar to this--but in less-effective reverse. I actually had a folder called "Sequester" where I'd throw any feed that was starting to get on my nerves (too many [kitty photos | jokey memes | posts about the salvation promised by Longhorn/Vista]). In NetNewsWire (and probably others) you can set a custom refresh time for a feed or its parent folder (cf.) to, in this instance, ensure you get a nice break from the bothersome content. So, for example, you could say to check your "Sequester" folder just every 72 hours. When the updates pop up, you can decide whether your ardor has truly cooled enough to unsubscribe (at which point, if you're like me, you move the feed to "Deleted" with "Don't Refresh this Feed" selected). Managing the glut of easy-to-subscribe RSS feeds is an issue I hear people asking about all the time. Do you have a good trick for culling your XML herd? [thanks, Ian] 11 Comments
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 This is a job our...Submitted by Jim (not verified) on October 18, 2005 - 2:35am.
This is a job our computers should be doing for us. Aggregators should tally up all the link clicks for each individual feed, average it out over the number of entries that feed gets, and suggest unsubscribing from the bottom 5% every week or so. Alternatively, have "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" icons to click when you like an entry or dislike an entry. The first method is vulnerable to unsubscribing from feeds that have 10 poor entries but one fantastic one. » POSTED IN:
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