Managing 130+ RSS Feeds
In recent months I have been growing increasingly frustrated with my RSS reader and the 130 feeds it contains. I was starting to find it difficult to keep up, and was considering deleting feeds – the solution however turned out to be as simple as some folder reorganisation.
After seeing a few sites publishing RSS feeds back around 2003 it took me some time actually work out what they were and how to use them but ever since then I have not looked back. I have found them to be incredibly time saving allowing me to keep up with the many news sources I want to read, without spending hours every day doing so. It got to a stage where I was writing Perl script to parse sites that did not have feeds, and create them automatically, now however things have moved on where this is no longer necessary as most sites publish their own, and for those that do not, there are web services such as Ponyfish which provide a simple web interface for the process.
Having used RSS for some time I have gone through a number of different reader applications from a custom coded Perl/PHP script, to a desktop client, back to an updated custom coded PHP script, and finally to Google Reader which I am currently using. Google Reader has some issues every now and again but even so it is very effective. Both the web based applications, and desktop client I was using started suffered from scalability issues, the more feeds that were added. Google Reader however certainly does not (at least not at the moment). Google seems to have concentrated on getting the basics stable before adding features although the scrollbar changing size and moving takes some getting used to. You can also access the Google Reader via a cut down web interface on the move and use it offline via Google Gears.
Lately however I have been finding it difficult to keep up, tending just skip over all the new items briefly without reading any in depth, just to get through them – not all that useful. I tried using aideRSS which ranks items by filtering out those that are not so popular but its idea of popular did not match what I wanted to read. The problem however turns out not to be the number of feeds as many publish only a few new items every day/week but rather high volume feeds such as Digg, TechCrunch, and Engadge which monopolised space in the reader. I finally came up with a workable strategy which involves a 4 folder structure:
- "Priority Feeds" – Usually low volume feeds I am interesting in reading immediately when they are published.
- "Detailed Reads" – Feeds which generally take some time to get through where I would typically read all / most items in detail.
- "Other Feeds" – Mixed assortment of all other feeds that would typically not read in detail but still like to keep an eye on.
- "High Volume Feeds" – Feeds which publish a lot of content and I would generally skip over quickly only stopping if there was something really interesting.
With this strategy I can now spend time reading what I am really interested in but also not let high volume feeds with less important content take up too much of my time.
