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Sink or Swim: Managing RSS Feeds with Better Groups
Matt Wood | Nov 27 2007
Besides baseball, coffee, and my music collection, I probably obsess over how I read RSS feeds more than anything. Sometimes it feels like I tinker with the setup more than I actually read the news, but I'm making progress. I won't claim to be completely satisfied with how or why I try to consume so much information from the internet, but lately I've been as content with the process as I can hope. Bailing Out Trying to stay on top of dozens of feeds can feel like trying to squeeze a river through a kitchen strainer. I used to be a NetNewsWire guy, but I switched to Google Reader this summer to simplify switching between multiple computers. At first it exacerbated the feeling that for what little info I could process through that strainer, I might as well just give up and let it flood the place. Unlike more powerful desktop readers like NNW, Google Reader doesn't give you any options to control the refresh rate of feeds, how long they stay in your queue before disappearing, etc. So if I missed a day, or even a few hours without checking in, hundreds of unread items would keep piling up, with no chance of my ever finishing them. So I started marking hundreds of items at a time as read, and sure enough I felt better. It was like dipping a bucket in the river instead of trying to drink the whole thing, and after a few days I realized it was okay to let a few things pass me by. Group Them the Way You Read Them The magic trick for me though, has to do with how I group the feeds in Google Reader. This can be accomplished with any modern news reader, but the Google's does things in a particular way that really hits a sweet spot. When given the option to group things, we tend to do it topically, with labels like "Sports," "Technology," "Blogs," etc. For years, I lumped my feeds into folders like this, thinking it would help me manage them, but all it did was help me ignore just how many I'd subscribed to by tucking them away in folders. I still looked at the growing numbers of unread items and felt that endless sense of dread that I would never finish. Knowing how to cut my losses when I got behind was nice, but it was also making me miss a lot of stuff that I wished I hadn't. I didn't mind skipping through some feeds, like standard news or high-frequency group blogs, but I felt bad missing my friend's weekly update, or that new column from one of my favorite writers. So it dawned on me to group my feeds by the way in which I want to read them, not by topic. If there were some feeds that I didn't mind missing, and some of which I wanted to read every single word, I should organize them that way, not by their putative subject areas. Here's what I came up with:
Again, nothing revolutionary, but it's made my daily information gathering process more manageable, namely because it gives me an easy way out when I've fallen behind. Process Your Pleasure The obvious alternative to all this would be to simply cut the number of feeds I try to follow, and I wholeheartedly agree. Like I said, I have a pretty high threshold for what gets into the club, and keeping things in that Skip 'Em folder makes it easy to identify which ones might be on the chopping block. But this approach gives me the latitude to read broadly in a number of subject areas and still focus on the most important stuff. The fact that I felt compelled to write about this is quite ridiculous, really. I've taken what should be a leisurely activity and turned it into a dull process. But I also realized that I derive a lot of pleasure from reading all these news sites and blogs, and there was no sense in depriving myself. The dull process has kept it enjoyable. 22 Comments
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I've gone in a similar direction...Submitted by whitneymcn on November 27, 2007 - 4:26pm.
I made a similar shift a couple of years ago, too -- though my response to my own taxonomic compulsions has been to go even further in the other direction. I have just four folders: Daily: Self-explanatory. The feeds that I want to read individually every day. New Subs: The folder where I drop any new subscriptions. I generally keep things in there for a few weeks to see whether I maintain an interest, and then move them into one of the other folders or unsubscribe. Bulk: This is where most feeds go if I keep them after the "new subs" trial period. I tend to read the contents of the bulk folder in a "river of news" reverse-chronological style. I'll only occasionally go through and look at individual feeds. Volume: Similar to bulk, but a place for the feeds that update really frequently (and would thus dominate the bulk folder if I put them in there). The gotcha in my system, though, is that the two latter folders are really used as input for the "watches" that I have set up in FeedDemon (best feed reader ever): I have an ever-changing list of word/phrase searches set up (based on my interests at any given time), watching all the feeds I'm subscribed to. This pulls any items that may be of particular interest to me without my going through 500+ feeds individually. I've basically shifted to a low-friction approach where I'm consuming the aggregate product rather than the individual feeds. » POSTED IN:
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