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Last month I started cleaning up my RSS feeds in the hope of making them less of a chore. Well, its been one month since then and I have deleted 72 feeds that have saved me 10,000 articles a month. This has helped me keep my RSS feeds manageable and I no longer feel like I’m a slave to Google Reader.

One of the biggest things I did was remove digg from my RSS reader. Why? Well first off it was my highest traffic feed, so deleting it helped save me hours a day and 2nd, I also go to digg.com anyways to digg articles. There was no real reason to have it in my RSS reader. So now what I do is once a day goto digg.com and look through the last few pages digging and reading as I go.

I can still trim a little more in the way of feeds but for now I’m a lot more productive during the day as I’m not tied to my RSS reader all the time. If I delete my new top traffic feed, techbargians.com, I can save another 2500 articles a month and probably some money too since I won’t see all the great bargains that I “must” have.

If you visit this page via RSS, you may not of noticed I’ve added a “shared articles” link to my link bar. What this is is a link to my shared items on Google Reader. I use this to keep track of what article I want to follow up on or read later. So now you can see what I’m reading too. You can even subscribe to it via RSS. Since I’m constantly adding and removing items, subscribing to the feed feed might be the best way to keep up.

[Link to my Google Reader Shared Items page]
[My OPML file]

I rely heavily on RSS feeds to get my daily fix of news. As you can see above, I don’t read a ridiculous amount of feeds but enough to keep me busy most of the day. One of the problems I’m starting to notice is that I’m spending a lot of time online just to keep up. I’m not sure how other people use RSS but i read everything that comes in. Maybe not “read” it all but definitely skim over the article. In the last 30 days, I’ve read over 24,000 articles. Thats a lot of reading and a lot of time invested to not fall behind. This reared its ugly head during my trip to Macworld this year. The internet at the hotel was so bad it was just about unusable unless it was early in the morning. So while I tried to keep up on stuff, I fell behind to the tune of about 3,000 unread items by the time I got home. It took me hours to just get through everything and catch up.

I’m finding I want to be doing more stuff on and off the computer but feel tied to my RSS reader. Catch up on podcasts, blog, World of Warcraft, watch TV shows, Netflix, workout, play my Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS, photography etc. I work nights so my time is split up between before work and after so I can’t just do a lot of stuff.

I’ve been bouncing around news readers for awhile, Bloglines, Newsgator, NetNewsWire, endo, NewsFire, Google Reader to name a few in the past months. I’ve settled on Google Reader due to its web interface so I can access my feeds from both home and work. It’s missing some nice features of desktop clients but its ability to be “everywhere once” outweighs everything else. One feature I missed was Dinosaurs in NetNewsWire. Basically It showed outdated feeds that haven’t updated in awhile.

Enter Google Reader Trends.

It shows statistics based on your feeds. This includes what your reading, what your starring and what your sharing along with subscription based stats such as frequently read and inactive. Inactive is what I’ve been missing. It shows me the Top 10, 20 and 40 feeds that haven’t been updated.

So starting today I’m going to “trim the fat” as they say. I’m going to start deleting feeds that I don’t really need or want to keep up on. This should help me feel less tied down and hopefully free up some more time do so other things. I’m also going to start using the Sharing feature in Google Reader to share what I find interesting. You can see my Shared page at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/17007536064916393533. You can even subscribe to it to keep up to date.

My current OPML file is up on Share your OPLM if you’re interested in what feeds i read. This is the original file I will be trimming. I’ll post my new file when I’m finished.

Here is how to tweak Flock’s My News to allow the sidebar to stay open and bypass the Front Page.

1. type “about:config” in the Address bar
2. in the Filter box, search for “flock.feeds.sidebar_tab_interaction“
3. double click on it and it changes from TRUE to FALSE

Now you will be able to open My News as a sidebar in the current tab and
not automatically load the Front Page. You will be able to pick what
feed or group you want to view from the sidebar, and it
will load in the current tab. Now if they just change it so links clicked on from My News would load in a new Window or Tab instead of the current window, I’d be all set.

I’ve been a Bloglines user for over a year now and have been mostly happy with them outside of a few small details. The layout could be better, some feeds wont import, way it handles feeds that update articles and clicking on the feed marks the all as read are probably my biggest peeves. I’ve tried standalone RSS readers but always went back to Bloglines. It was nice to have all my feeds marked as read no matter where i checked it. From my Mac, XP, cell phone, work, or home, I would never read the same article twice. It was perfect. Firefox extensions, Dashboard widgets would always keep me notified.

With my recent switch to Mac OS X, alot of the way i was used to computing has changed. I’ve completely eliminated my Windows XP desktop and my laptop is on its way out, so i don’t boot it up very often, so 98% of everything i do is now on my Mac. With this, I’ve been introduced to alot of new software. One has been NetNewsWire. I’ve tried it before as I give just about every peice of software recommended to me its 15secs of fame on my desktop. As with all other desktop RSS readers, everything is local and not
sync’d between multipy computers. With the latest NetNewsWire 2.1 beta, it added Newsgator syncing. I’ve never used Newsgator before but with the signup being free, what the hell. Installed NetNewsWire Lite 2.1 beta and signed up to Newsgator.

Like most people, change is hard. Even tho I welcome trying new ways, its hard to break old habits. One way I deal with this when using something new on the computer is to delete everything that has to do with the way I’ve been doing it. In my case here I deleted all my Bloglines bookmarks, bookmarklets and uninstalled all widgets and Firefox extensions. This way I can’t go back and if i want to do something, I’ll need to learn the new way like it or not. So I’ve been using it for a few days now and I’m still getting
used to using a desktop reader instead of a web reader. So far:

Pro’s

• See the actually unread count in my Dock
• Dont have to have my Web browser open
• Newsgator’s web layout is beautiful
• Feeds arent marked as read if i click on the feed
• Saves old articles like email
• Deals with updated feeds
• Free version of NetNewsWire

Cons:

• No Firefox extension
• Need to pay for the mobile version
• No free Windows client