How to use RSS
Lee Lefever, who writes CommonCraft, a blog we like a lot, has a good post on how to manage and use RSS in your work/personal life. He has asked the question: What is your RSS reading strategy? What advice do you have for maximizing your reading? Here are some excerpts from the very good comments:
Explore posts in the same categories: Main Page“* I use RSS for pretty much everything these days… blogs, system status reports, tracking a Gmail account, forum participation, and so on. So I've got a few hundred “physical” subscriptions.
* I use JournURL's aggregator to feed the app on my desktop (Newzcrawler)… the server side is essentially a pre-aggregator, bundling up feeds that I don't want to track individually.
* I use Newzcrawler's search channels pretty much constantly. They scan any items in the database that meet various conditions and pull them out for me. For example, there's a forum where my primary contributions are XML- or RSS-related… so while I subscribe to the forum's feed, I only read it via a search channel that's watching for “XML” or “RSS” in thread titles or bodies.
* I use feeds from PubSub, Feedster, etc. to watch for mentions of me or my work.
* I keep my feeds in Newzcrawler organized in a folder structure. The stuff I check frequently (the NYT, for example) goes into a “Favorites” folder that's at the top of the list. Referrer feeds and other admin-type stuff go into another folder. Entertainment-oriented feeds go into a folder that I check once a day or so. And so on.
* Newzcrawler allows me to flag items for later review, and I use that capability a lot. Particularly when dealing with partial-content feeds… if the server's down the first time I try to click-through to read the entire thing, I just flag it and come back later.
* This is probably starting to sound like a Newzcrawler ad, but I also make extensive use of its support for the wfw:commentRss extension. On blogs with per-post comment feeds, NC lets me subscribe to a post's comments with one click. Much, much better than email subscriptions… hint, hint.”
“a) remind myself to periodically look at feeds which are piled with unread messages. Is it really necessary to remain subscribed? Am I subscribed just because I “should” be reading it? And then whittle mercilesslyb) make use of tabbed browsing: I skim the feeds, middle click the interesting looking items to open in new tabs, then read them separately. I find I get through much more that way.
c) handle to_reads: I make liberal use of printing items which I keep in a “to read” folder– it's amazing how much I can get through while offline.
d) strip repetition– I periodically remove one or the other of the blogs which feature A-listers primarily talking about each other… I only need one half (or third, whatever) of the echo chamber
e) I'm experimenting with rolling multiple feeds that I like to skim occasionally into one large feed…”
“I use RSS very avidly these days. I don't really like the online Newsgator interface because it doesn't give me enough organization and filtering among and between my subscriptions. I use Shrook for the Mac and like it because it has an Itunes-like interface with four columns. I have organized all my feeds into folders and I start my day by checking feeds related to my company and work. I have a few “RSS radars” set up that track key words (like my name) and other topics of interest. I then go on to check support forums for the blogging software we are using and my mac forums. Then I go to my elearning folder (where Common Craft resides). I have folders for topics like RSS, Search, and Social Networking. Then I have a set of personal blogs I read on and off. I would say I check this folder once a week at most. I also track my Netflix queue and new releases via RSS. I have a news folder that has Wired, WSJ, Washington Post, and a few other publications, but I rarely read any of these feeds. They have gotten pushed down too far in terms of priority.”
“I use Bloglines, and I have a number of categories (News, Tech, Personal, etc.) for my feeds, currently at 255 (I get about 10 new feeds a week). The boundaries between the categories/folders are a little fuzzy, and sometimes I classify a feed into one and later move it into another, but the key is that I use the categories to read. That is, I'll read all the new posts in News, then maybe in Culture (the fuzziest of them all), etc. This way, I rarely have more that about 75 items to check, and most of them get skimmed. The system is starting to reach it's breaking point, so I've either got to unsubscribe from a bunch or find a way to improve the strategy, but up until now it's worked really well for me.”
“I also have a many feeds (around 70 to 80) but I use Feed Demon. I know it's not free ($30) but it worth it. You can create watches that look for specific keywords in news items as they're downloaded.
For example, I've created a watch that looks for the words “desktop search, filehand, google desktop, copernic, etc..” then every news item containing those words will be stored in the specified watch.
It's very useful if you subscribe to hundreds of channels that you may not want to read regularly, yet always find out when one of them has an item that's of interest.”
