No Longer Drowning in Feeds
Though I’ve been using NetNewsWire for over a year—now free, by the way—I started the new year off by trashing all of my RSS feeds and starting from scratch. Unfortunately, this whole starting-over process had happened multiple times, so drastic changes were in order.
Although there was a select group of feeds I found valuable and insightful, most of my folders were overflowing with hundreds of unread items. Discussions at 43folders and kottke.org presented a solution: discard the old genre-based filing system in favor of a new approach to feed organization.
Instead of filing feeds by their content (i.e. Coffee, literature, development, art, technology, etc…), I began ranking feeds into appropriately named folders by level of importance, or mode. Reading considered essential, regardless of topic, goes in the “1_essentials” folder. As I add new feeds, I rank them accordingly, and the system looks like something this:
- 1_essential
- 2_not_quite_essential
- 3_peruse_at_leisure
- 4_news
- 5_tests
It’s nearly impossible to keep up with the flood of daily articles from BBC News, NYTimes and the other major media updates, so I entered all of my regularly updated news feeds into a dedicated news folder. Now, I can see the day’s headlines at a glance and easily access the coverage by different news outlets.
It’s been almost a month, and I’m happy with the results so far. I quickly make it through my essentials each day, and if time presents itself, I can browse those not quite essential items. Interesting new feeds immediately get dumped into a test folder. After a period of several weeks, I’ll check the reading statistics for the test feeds in GReader’s Trends menu and trash any feeds I’m not regularly reading.
As for Google Reader, I tried it out mainly because it works better while traveling and when using multiple computers. Since its launch, Google Reader has seen definite improvements: great tagging features (helpful for highlighting articles to come back to or to share with friends), RSS export of shared items, and it’s surprisingly fast. If you’re thinking about switching to GReader, I can’t recommend Jon Hicks’s wonderful theme enough.
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