Awhile ago I purged a bunch of RSS feeds that I wasn’t reading or wasn’t excited about reading when new stuff came through.
If I don’t want to read your stuff as soon as I see it, why read it?
And it was good.
However, the problem is that it left me with a lot of RSS feeds that I had the desire to read right now.
(Aside: When I say RSS feed of course I mean RSS 0.7, RSS 1, RSS 2, ATOM, and whatever else the kids are pushing with their XML these days. I’m sure someone cares about the specific names, I’m just not one of them.)
My previous system has now collapsed under its own weight, and I needed to revise it.
Previously, I had thought that my ideal number of RSS feeds was one screenful on my MacBook, without folders. That became problematic when I realized that there were sites I wanted to follow but they didn’t post all that often. I didn’t really want to see them every time I opened my RSS reader. Don’t ask me why, I don’t really know. I just didn’t.
I also realized that although I may want to read all of these feeds immediately, there are very few I have to read immediately. The problem is that with my relatively low distraction threshold, I would get sucked in.
So I have decided to try a new grouping, as shown below:
These should be self-evident, but just in case they aren’t:
ASAP is stuff that I want to read as soon as there is something there. Right now there are exactly 4 RSS feeds in there: my Dreamhost personal support feed (which tells me when there’s a known-problem on one of my Dreamhost-hosted sites), the NewsGator support feed, and the feed for school closings for my kid’s school district. There is also a folder there with feeds for any new versions of a few pieces of software. (More software ought to do that, by the way, have an RSS feed dedicated to new versions, rather than making me wait until I launch the app and have it check. IMO.) Some of these feeds may not be updated all that often, but if there is something in one of them, I want to know about it.
Then there are the Daily feeds. These are not feeds which only post once a day. These are feeds I only really need to read once a day. Most of the Mac-News sites that I follow are in this category. I may very well end up checking this more than once a day, but I’d feel comfortable knowing that it got to Zero at least daily.
Weekly feeds are the same, with the exception that I suspect that the feeds won’t collapse under their own weight if I ignore them for a week. Note that some RSS feeds only hold the most recent X number of posts, but NNW will hold more than that. Here I did put some once-a-week things such as podcasts, etc. What happens if your weekly podcast comes out on Monday and I did my once-a-week read-through on Sunday? Well, could be that I won’t hear it for a week. That’s OK, I’ve got plenty of other things to do.
Yearly is, of course, a complete misnomer. I started Yearly for one simple reason: MacSanta. MacSanta is an annual program but it only happens once a year, close to (as you may have guessed) Christmas. When MacSanta is active, I will move it to the Daily group, however once I realized that I could have a Yearly group, I wanted one.
“But!” you complain “Why not call it ‘Monthly’ instead? Wouldn’t that be the next logical group?”
Sure, except for one problem: M comes before W.
If I did that, Monthly would be listed before Weekly as I read from top to bottom.
“But you could change NetNewsWire to manual sort!” Yes, I could, but I want all of the feeds inside the groups to be sorted A-Z, so choosing Sort Subscriptions By Name just made sense.
Also, my previous sort method was “Sort By Attention” but that really didn’t seem to carry over into the iPhone version of NewsGator online. It’s really hard to beat A-Z for organizational purposes (well… assuming you speak English, I suppose).
Not only that, but it gives me a clear top-down structure of importance/urgency. This is what “Sort By Attention” was, I believe, meant to provide for you, by bubbling up stuff that you actually seemed to care about by watching your actions.
Lastly, I need a place to put new feeds.
I could dump them right into one of the above groups — but frankly, they’re all just getting to know each other, and I want them to have some group-building time. If I keep adding new friends, it might end up diluting the entire group.
So for the time being, any new RSS feed gets shunted into the awkwardly named “z New” group, tagged with an uncomfortable leading “z” to make sure they realize that they are at the end of the attention food chain. However, if I open that folder up and notice that one of these new kids on the block is catching my eye, she might find herself getting bumped up to the Daily show. That’s life. Scrap it out, newbies! Fight for social acceptance!
That’s my bit of RSS “life-hackery” for today.
Got a better system? Tell me all about it at luomat at gmail dot com
If you convince me that yours is better, you will win both pride and satisfaction. Sure you can’t use those feelings to buy a newspaper or a cup of coffee, but it’s still worth something, right? I might even say that you were right and I was wrong, and, honestly, isn’t that the kind of praise you’ve been waiting to hear ever since you graduated from kindergarten?