Cutting Down On Your RSS Feeds
I know it has been nearly two months since the last time I posted and I’m not going to apologize for it, mostly because I have good reasons for not post (sick for nearly two weeks, traveling, terribly busy with other projects), but also because I think it is terribly cliche for bloggers to post once every few months and then spend the first few paragraphs talking about why they haven’t been posting… I’m only going to use the first paragraph.
So one of the major problems that I have run into when it comes to keeping up with the news is packing too many RSS feeds into your reader. I don’t have the hundreds of RSS feeds that I know some people do, I can’t, I have some sort of weird impulse forcing me to empty the new items out of my RSS reader everyday, that way I never get behind. That wouldn’t be so bad but for the past year and a half or so I’ve been collecting RSS feeds from all sorts of places, currently I only have 102 feeds but that translates to nearly 1,000 items a day that I have to look through.
What I needed to do was find out two things:
What RSS feeds haven’t been updated in a few months and don’t see any signs of updating in the near future?
and
What RSS feeds do I actually use?
I would like to get rid of all of the feeds that haven’t updated in a while and the ones that I don’t use. Now Google Reader (my RSS feed reader of choice) makes it pretty easy to find out what feeds haven’t been updated in a while.
From the picture above you can see that I only have one RSS feed that I’m willing to get rid of that hasn’t updated in the past few months, Cellularized.com can be removed from my reader.
Done.
The next batch of RSS feeds that I’d like to get rid of are the ones I don’t actually use. Since Google Readers trends doesn’t lend itself very nicely to my workflow (which is I use J and K to go through the feeds, hit S to star them, then when I’m done I go through the starred items, unstar them and bookmark them in my browser), I had to find another way of figuring out what feeds I use. What I decided to do was, every time I went into my starred items I listed all of those feeds in a spreadsheet. After about a week and a half I had 77 feeds listed in the spreadsheet.
I went through all of the feeds that I haven’t starred anything in and decided whether or not I wanted to keep them, I deleted the ones I didn’t want to keep and the rest stayed in.
I ended cutting about 20 or so RSS feeds off of my reading list, this has significantly lowered the amount of items I’ve had to read on a daily basis (many of the feeds I got rid of would post nearly 30 items a day), I’ve got the average items per day down to roughly 800, which doesn’t sound like it is much smaller than 1,000 but trust me, it is.
End.
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