2005-09-25
Happy Discardia: Feeds [2]
Well, this (Happy Discardia: Feeds [1]) was easy, at least for now - and I really feel stupid for making silly and pretty obvious mistakes. Here are the most striking ones:
* I was subscribed to some feeds multiple times (redundancy). There really should be some mechanism for synchronizing feeds between various clients.
* I didn't have one OPML file covering all my subscriptions (reference). I was adding one set of feeds in Bloglines, and another one in NetNewsWire. Feeds providing full text I subscribed in Vienna, and so on.
* I was processing feeds like emails, they absorbed way too much attention. You probably know the Email 101 a la GTD, and this is brilliant for emails, but it becomes a sisyphean challenge when you try to empty your inbox in Bloglines. I also didn't differentiate between various feed reading modes (see below). This actually was my biggest mistake.
* I had no filter between stumbling across an interesting posting and subscribing to the feed.
So I just made a few minor technical adjustments, which made me feel much better already:
* if in doubt: unsubscribe;
* I made Bloglines my master-repository for all feeds (and erased all other accounts),
* set up a folder for each of my major use cases for feeds (reading blogs, scrolling linklogs, being notified of progress in projects or calendar events, scanning the tagweb for topics,...), defined a reading mode for each of them (some feeds are important and might trigger an action, others make an enjoyable read on rainy weekends, some feeds I want to check daily but no headache if I won't, and so on),
* and moved all remaining feeds to their corresponding new homes.
Actually I should have stopped there, but I also resubscribed some of those folders at other services like Rojo, NewsGator, or SearchFox RSS again, if they provide a significant advantage for the corresponding reading mode, still need to fiddle around here.
Only one thing was missing to kick off fresh again: clicking Mark All Read.
[rss] [infoeconomy] [superegoblogging] - trackback
* I was subscribed to some feeds multiple times (redundancy). There really should be some mechanism for synchronizing feeds between various clients.
* I didn't have one OPML file covering all my subscriptions (reference). I was adding one set of feeds in Bloglines, and another one in NetNewsWire. Feeds providing full text I subscribed in Vienna, and so on.
* I was processing feeds like emails, they absorbed way too much attention. You probably know the Email 101 a la GTD, and this is brilliant for emails, but it becomes a sisyphean challenge when you try to empty your inbox in Bloglines. I also didn't differentiate between various feed reading modes (see below). This actually was my biggest mistake.
* I had no filter between stumbling across an interesting posting and subscribing to the feed.
So I just made a few minor technical adjustments, which made me feel much better already:
* if in doubt: unsubscribe;
* I made Bloglines my master-repository for all feeds (and erased all other accounts),
* set up a folder for each of my major use cases for feeds (reading blogs, scrolling linklogs, being notified of progress in projects or calendar events, scanning the tagweb for topics,...), defined a reading mode for each of them (some feeds are important and might trigger an action, others make an enjoyable read on rainy weekends, some feeds I want to check daily but no headache if I won't, and so on),
* and moved all remaining feeds to their corresponding new homes.
Actually I should have stopped there, but I also resubscribed some of those folders at other services like Rojo, NewsGator, or SearchFox RSS again, if they provide a significant advantage for the corresponding reading mode, still need to fiddle around here.
Only one thing was missing to kick off fresh again: clicking Mark All Read.
[rss] [infoeconomy] [superegoblogging] - trackback
Comments:
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Excellent ideas, but what is really needed to make things perfect is a tool that removes all the duplicates and things you have seen before :
Hot items appear in multiple places, and there are always new people rediscovering old things (some very old). Getting rid of these would make a huge difference. I think I might develop something to do that.
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Hot items appear in multiple places, and there are always new people rediscovering old things (some very old). Getting rid of these would make a huge difference. I think I might develop something to do that.
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