Strategies to clean up your rss feed subscriptions

Strategies to clean up your rss feed subscriptions - Readers Sound Off

by Jason Clarke Feb 26th 2007

Ugh. I'm buried under unread RSS feeds. Right now if I look down at Google Reader Notifier (a Firefox Add-In), I see that I've got 1927 unread items in my subscriptions.

I thought I was being responsible; I've got my feeds split up into logical categories, including one called "Now", which is the stuff I told myself I would always stay current on. Google Reader won't tell me exactly how many unread items are in that folder, but it's more than 100... that's for sure.

While there's nothing you can do about it if life simply gets too busy to stay current, there should be a way to pare down what you're reading to a manageable level. In fact, Google Reader's Trends page will show you what you are (and aren't) paying attention to, who hasn't posted in forever, and which feeds simply bury you under too much content. One click on the garbage can for any of the feeds in here will unsubscribe you.

That helps.

But it's not enough.

I still need help determining what is and isn't important to be following. I'm currently subscribed to almost 300 feeds, and that's after some heavy pruning. I need to be down around 100, but it depends on the feeds themselves; if they're relatively low traffic, I can carry many more.

So - Download Squad readers, Sound Off! Tell us how you mercilessly keep your feed subscriptions lean and mean. Hit up the comments!

Tags: information overload, InformationOverload, overwhelm, RSS, RSS Feeds, RssFeeds, subscriptions, techniques, tips, tricks

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Claudio Miranda said 9:12AM on 2-26-2007

That is a big subscriber list. I have 48 subscription (including yours of course) and I am struggling to stay reading that. Even last week I removed 3 feeds, categorized as "Fun and laugh".

The tip ? Try to remove those feeds you are certain will not make any difference, not reading it.

justelise said 9:15AM on 2-26-2007

I also have a problem with the feed thing. I find myself chronically adding feeds to Google Reader and not spending enough time editing my feed list.

Recently I got frustrated and I purged all feeds that were not full-content. I don't mean feeds with an 'after the jump' kind of flavor -- I mean feeds that only give you a sentence or two of the article. I dumped them all for a couple of reasons. I find it frustrating to have to go to the web site just to find out that I wasn't interested in finishing the article anyway. Secondly I always click through to the sites of feeds I read on a regular basis anyway - the idea that a site author feels the need to force me to click on the links in their feed to get me to their site for every article angers me. Finally, so many of the feeds I read all seem to recycle the same story over and over again that purging a bunch of partial feeds is going to have limited impact on my news gathering.

I only use full content feeds on my site for the same reasons.

http://itsreallyjustme.net/

Garrett said 9:46AM on 2-26-2007

I feel your feed pain.

I'm subscribed to a little over 80 feeds and spent the last six hours (I have no life, I admit it) crawling through back-logged news from the previous hectic week. It seems like if I miss more than a day of staying updated, I have to wade through the pile of various news articles and blog posts that magically appear out of nowhere.

As far as combating the issue...I'm currently subscribed to CNN, The Drudge Report, Google News, and The Guardian. I'm a news fiend, granted, but it is overkill. I normally end up "marking all as read" on many of the feeds (which in turn makes it pointless to be subscribed in the first place) and moving on to more interesting things (Download Squad, anyone?). If you're a news junkie and like it served in the RSS flavor,

I suggest picking one credible, regularly updated, full content feed (justelise's comment was spot on). CNN isn't very good at this, just a headline. Drudge has been on my shit list ever since I subscribed because of THEIR ALL CAPS TITLES. Guardian is alright, but way too brief. Google News, it seems, is going to be my choice from here forward.

I _hate_ marking any feed as read, simply because there's too many stories piling up. Hopefully we can all find a happy tipping point for our information addicted lifestyles and not go into sensory overload. =)

Garrett said 9:55AM on 2-26-2007

Also, does anyone have some good Greasemonkey or extensions for Google Reader? Maybe Download Squad should do a write-up. :)

Jo�o Almeida said 10:17AM on 2-26-2007

Having about one hundred feeds in Google Reader I face the same issue, but for me the problem isn't having lots of items to read (right now are 4766 on my list). The problem was that I was missing some important feeds somewhere among these hundreds of articles to read.

I solved it the same way: created a few tags that grouped the really important feeds for me ("essential_news", "essential_blogs", "essential_devstuff", etc), this way I was able to follow my favorite feeds easily. As for the other feeds, the ones I don't mind missing some articles, I just browse them quickly, to check if there's something interesting, and then mark them all as read, or sometimes I just mark all them as read...

In the end I guess the only way to keep the rss subscriptions clean is having just a few feeds on a list, or an abnormal amount of free time to read them all.

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..::] photoblog | blog.temujinphoto.com [::.
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Jack said 10:58AM on 2-26-2007

I find that if the feed has more than 5 uninteresting posts in a row I unsubscribe.

Also you find yourself reading the same thing over and over - if a site isn't original then maybe unsubscribe.

One more tip: Don't subscribe to a full engadget feed, I found they posted about 40-60 times a day.

Stuart Ian Burns said 11:25AM on 2-26-2007

I use the Sesame Street approach:

On each day I generally only read the feeds whose title begins with the given letter. So today's internet was brought to me by the letters Z, U, N and G on the number 26.

Alec Peden said 1:09PM on 2-26-2007

I just tackled this on my blog at http://www.the8thsign.com/2007/02/21/google-trends-and-rss-revisited/.

One of the best things I did was delete feeds that I would goto the webpages anyways. The biggest one of these was digg.com. After reading the article in my rss reader, I would goto the site to digg the article anyways. So I deleted the feed and now just visit digg.com daily. Since digg's feed was high traffic, that right off the bat saved me alot of reading.

My basic strategy was to look at the high traffic feeds first and see what I could consolidate. If you like gadget news but just really want to keep up to date on the important news, do you really need both engadget and gizmodo? Anything important will be covered by both so its safe to delete one. One other thing I did that was already mentioned was to delete any feeds that were just headlines.

Victor Agreda, Jr. said 1:28PM on 2-26-2007

Something I used to do was keep several RSS readers around. I'd keep a master list in one, like Bloglines or something, but I would segment the feeds in different readers. Some of these would feed into various places, filtered by context, essentially.

My iPod would get "fun" or friend's feeds, for when I had a spare moment and wanted a quick read. Work goes into the industrial-strength reader. And so on.

Best advice is to organize and don't be afraid to hit "mark all as read!"

Aaron said 3:24PM on 2-26-2007

Some type of feed filter that removed items with the same subject would be huge for me. It seems half my feeds post similar or duplicated items (ie. Apple announces the iphone! on like 80 feeds) and some aggregator that would filter out this duplicate content by subject would save me a HUGE amount of time scanning and reading feeds. I would like one feed of all my subscriptions filtered by subject to remove duplicates. I bet that would cut the time I need to stay on top of my feeds by at least 1/3. If anyone knows anything like this, please respond.

Jon Snyder said 5:23PM on 2-26-2007

I have the same type of problems (my counter is at 1284 right now), but I can overcome them with some good ways to read the blogs. For instance, I like to file them in different folders (like everybody else) and read them folder by folder and not feed by feed. I also like to skim through them really quick and just star the ones I want to read. Then I just come back to the stared ones at the end.

Now that I think about about it. What would be a really cool feature (for me at least) is to be able to star a stared one again. Maybe in a different colored star or something. That way I could "bookmark" my favorites that I have stared and read before. If anyone makes a greasemonkey script on that please contact me.

Ron Larson said 6:55PM on 2-26-2007

I use Kinja.com, which allows me to apply tags to my feeds. Then I can browse feeds by tags, and drill down to articles I am interested in.

By using tags like Gmail does, I find it easy to focus on one subject when I browse my feeds' headlines.

Jonas Martinsson said 2:46AM on 2-27-2007

I recently revamped my Google Reader tags/folders into a-list, b-list, c-list and so on. That way I can make sure to have read the most important feeds first. I blogged about this on http://jonasmartinsson.blogspot.com/2007/02/google-reader-hacks.html

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