Managing RSS
We were talking about RSS and the various readers and problems with them at work so I thought I would share my method for managing.
I am the kind of person that hates having unread messages pile up in the RSS reader. News sites and very active blogs (like TechCrunch) post a lot and this volume combined with the fact that an RSS reader is a separate program or webpage you must stop everything to go and look at meant unread messages piled up. I would eventually give up and mark everything as read once the pile became too large. I also hate having to navigate to separate pages to get information and news. Keeping updated is distracting enough even with everything centralized in a reader.
Now I use Google Reader as the RSS reader. It still has the problem of being a separate webpage that must be kept open but I never actually look at my Google Reader account except to add new feeds. I am subscribed to 70ish blogs but I only subscribe to ones that post infrequently (no more than once a day on average, many are weekly). These are typically personal blogs but I have a few multi-author and company ones that are low volume in there as well covering everything from load balancers to what my friends are up to. If a blog doesn’t show all post content in its RSS feed I will not subscribe to it in Google Reader. I was pretty frustrated when the Freakonomics Blog moved to nytimes and stopped publishing full content in the feed.
Then I have an iGoogle homepage setup. This is a dashboard that you can see in place of the Google minimalistic standard. On this page I embed a Google Reader widget in the prime top left spot which allows me to catch the entries from all those blog subscriptions in Google Reader. Then for any high volume blogs or sites I want to keep up with but don’t care about reading every post I drop a widget specific to that site on the dashboard. This includes things like TechCrunch, Reuters, and PostgreSQL Planet. I also will put incomplete feed blogs like Freakonomics mentioned above here in the lower areas of the page. My iGoogle homepage looks like this at the moment:
You can have multiple tabs too, but I only create those temporarily for things. One example is while purchasing a new house several months back I had a tab full of mortgage rate trends, interest rate and market stories, etc so with one click I got all that information I wanted. I like to have all of the regular stuff on one page so I can scan it easily when I hit Google.
If a blog I am subscribed to with Google Reader is getting too chatty I will decide if it is worth keeping up with that volume. If it is it goes in the dashboard as its own widget (since I don’t have to keep up with them there, I just catch the posts that look interesting as they cycle through) and if not I just remove it. Now every time I go to Google (dozens of times a day probably to look things up) I get a peek at my RSS reader and all the headlines from other sources in a few seconds. I can read almost everything right there on iGoogle and it is easy to click through to the source site or source article for a closer look. Not all the widgets fit in the top of the page where I see them every time I visit Google but i’ll scroll down a few times a day to catch those.
I’ve found this to be very effective for me.