How to manage 100+ feeds without crying
Monday, May 19th, 2008
Just a quick post to tell anyone who cares that I’ve finally picked a real method for managing my growing RSS feeds in NetNewsWire. My first advice is to get a real RSS reader, of course. Something that lets you categorize your feeds, either NetNewsWire (I paid for it, but now it’s free), NewsFire, Google Reader, etc. You have to break up your feeds at least a little bit.
Special Folders
First, I threw online comics and my daily deals like woot! into their own folders. When I want to read today’s Dilbert, I’m not in the mood to look through a lot of news feeds, and the same goes for my daily MacUpdate promos. I look at those early in the morning on my iPhone, normally. I need to be able to jump on those woot! deals first thing, you know?
The River
Next, I created a folder I just call “The River”. This has almost all of my feeds in it, and I look through it once or twice a day as a quick glance through everything going on in the world that I might care about. It’s basically a fire hose of information, and undoubtedly, I might miss something, but I’m okay with that. I scan through all the headlines spending about a second on each one. If something is remotely interesting, I’ll open it. If I accidentally miss something and it disappears, it will probably be duplicated on one of the other blogs in the river. This actually gives me the freedom to throw even more feeds into the river. Since I’m scanning everything, throwing more feeds in just allows me to have a bigger view of the world and spot more trends as they are repeated. I can easily have two or three-hundred items in this feed to glance through without feeling any stress at all.
Heavy Hitters
Finally, I’ve pulled a small handful of feeds into a special folder I call the “Heavy Hitters”. The heavy hitters are bloggers whose articles I will always read. I don’t want them lost in the river, because I know that I’ll read every word they write. This is only a half-dozen writers for me. I probably know them personally, and they aren’t just “aggregators” of other blogs. Because of this, I will probably only have five or six posts show up in this folder on most days.
My Secret Weapon
Of course, my not-so-secret weapon is the NewsGator service. Because I use NetNewsWire on my laptop, it syncs up automatically with NewsGator online. It just happens that NewsGator has my favorite iPhone interface for reading RSS feeds. So, I end up reading everything on my iPhone about 80% of the time and just “clipping” the few articles that are too long or use Flash video that I can’t watch on my iPhone.
