6 Tips for Taking Control of Your Unruly RSS Feeds
Posted on January 20, 2008
Filed under Uncategorized and tagged feed readers, flock, organisational tips, RSS, RSS readers
I have subscribed to (what for me is) quite a few blog and discussion feeds and on many occasion I find it very overwhelming to even open my reader to see all the posts I’ve got there to read. I’m one of those people who likes to have everything neat and tidy and finished, so I struggle to leave too many unread feeds for too long. Yes, I’ve done it. I’ve hit ‘Mark all items as read’ from time to time. I honestly don’t know how people who’ve got hundreds of feeds (I’ve got 80-odd) actually cope with them all. Tell us your secrets! Anyway, I sat down yesterday and tried to take more control of my unruly RSS feeds and here are a few tips that I came up with. Some of these tips have been adapted from a post on Zen Habits called Email Zen: Clean Out Your Inbox
1. Be Cruel
I found that I was just skipping over posts in some feeds because they were rehashing the same thing that many other people were writing about, and that there were just a few feeds I had subscribed to because I thought I should. So, I deleted a few. If I need them again, I know where to find them. The trick is not keeping something because you might need it, it’s knowing where to get it if you need it again. Be honest and be cruel. Delete those feeds you know you don’t really read. Be realistic about how much you can read and how often.
2. Organise into Folders
This really helps me to make sense of all the feeds that are coming in. I love categorising things and making lists, so grouping feeds into folders is something I can’t do without. With folders, I can see which group of feeds has a few things for me to read and judging by what category I’ve put them in, I can make a decision whether those feeds are something I want to read at any given time. For example, if I am not interested in reading any blogging advice today, but I want to catch up on what’s going on with the MFL teaching blogs that I’m subscribed to, then I go straight to that folder and concentrate on those feeds for the time being. With a restricted amount of feeds in the folder it helps me to feel less overwhelmed by the amount I have to read.
3. Prioritise your reading
We all know which blogs we read the most because we find them interesting and important. For me at the moment, these are my 31 Day Challenge Team, MFL Teaching Blogs, AUS edubloggers and a few US and UK edubloggers. They are the folders I will always look at first. These are the blogs I am most likely to comment on (the ones I plan to comment on more often!) and really become part of the communities surrounding them. There are some feeds I subscribe to just for resource purposes, for example - the mLearning and eLearning Resources folders. I don’t make a point of commenting on these blogs, and don’t necessarily read the feeds each time. Knowing that I don’t HAVE to read them helps to make the whole process less overwhelming.
4. Browse quickly, star items and then concentrate on reading those
One thing you could do is to browse through your feeds, reading the first one or two lines of each post and maybe a heading that stands out and use this information to decide whether you will read the whole thing. If you decide to read it all, star it. Then, once you’ve gone through your whole list this way, go back to your starred items and spend some time with them. If there are lots of blog posts for you to get through, you will be able to quickly tell which ones are covering similar ground and you can then decide which ones of those you will actually read. If you are coming across lots of articles in your reader about the same topic, see tip number 1. The only thing with browsing feeds and starring things for later, is that you have to actually get back to them later! Oh, the challenges…
5. Print longer posts out to read later
I don’t know about you, but I can’t do all of my reading on a compute screen. I’ve had enough after a while, but I still need time to read those longer posts. I know printing lots of things out if not very environmentally friendly, but I am not advocating that you print every post, just the longer ones that you really want to read but keep avoiding. Pull them out when you are in the waiting room at the dentist or doctors, or when you are on the train or even just when you prefer lying on the couch to sitting upright in front of your computer.
6. If the post is short enough for you to read immediately, do so.
One trap to getting things done is to fall into the ‘I’ll do it later’ hole. Oh there’s a lot to read there, I’ll do it later. Hmm, I’ve got a lot to say in that blog post, I’ll write it later. Of course you can’t always do everything on the spot, but doing as much as you can helps. Once you put something in the ‘I’ll do it later’ basket, how often do you come back to it? Honestly? If you do, that’s fantastic, but for many of us, putting it in that basket often means it stays there for quite a while and then either gets thrown out because the basket is too full or the ‘Mark all items as read’ button gets pressed! If a post can be read right then and there, read it. If you are sitting down thinking you are going to check your feeds when you really should be doing something else therefore you have no time to really read them, then don’t even open them up. Being rushed will only help you to feel more overwhelmed. Well, it does for me anyway.
I hope these tips are helpful. Please help me add to them! How do you manage your feeds? Don’t keep it a secret!
Just in case you were wondering, I use the reader in Flock to read my feeds because I really like the nice big layout they have. I sometimes feel that Google Reader is a bit cramped and I like things to be clear. I regularly export my feeds from Flock to Google Reader though, so then I have an online version as well. More on what else I do with my Flock browser soon!
If you’re interested in reading some blogging tips, check out these posts: Hey Good Lookin’ - advice for choosing a blog theme, 5 Ways Blogging is Like Running a Cafe and Being Yourself for the Betterment of Your Blog.
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Hi Jess,
I’ve just started following your blogs and am finding the content very useful and inspirational. I’m on a blog hiatus (when does a blog become defunct?), as I needed to find focus in a similar way to what you have, so you have provided some food for thought for me there! I’d like to get a new, singularly focused teaching blog set up on my domain, but need to really think through what I want to do with it.
In the meantime, at your prompting I’ve switched to Flock (how good is it?!) and become active on Twitter.
Organising my favourites now - we’re alike in that we enjoy filing.
Hope you’re getting some relaxation in too, and all the best for the new school year,
Nirvana
Great advice Jess! I’m completely overwhelmed on Google Reader at the moment and just reading blog posts is becoming a full time job. I’m going to take your advice and start using folders more, that’s for sure. I’ve found that lately I tend to be reading only the blogs that get tweeted about b/c it’s instant and I don’t even have to open up G-reader. Great new application of Twitter!
Hope the challenge is going well, I’m letting myself take more than 31 days to complete
Enjoyed the advice. Am going to have to be a lot more selective about my RSS feed now I am back at work after my lovely summer holiday.
BTW, hows the blog challenge going? Sarah