I am at a dangerous point in blogging.Ā I have 212 different RSS feeds / blogs that I read.Ā I know others manage a whole lot more but Iām not as good as they are.Ā Ā At one point back in 2000 or so I had only one feed that I subscribed to via the My Netscape Portal.Ā It was the news feed from the site I use to run, at www.theonering.comĀ (they no longer syndicate their news sadly).Ā Over the last 7 years or so, the number of feeds I read has increased.Ā Ā It is now at the point where it takes an hour to read everything each day.Ā I am now starting to run into a barrier of having too many feeds and I need to change something.Ā I am running into several problems.Ā
The first is that I am still looking for a taxonomy to manage all my feeds.Ā As I scale up to this level, I am starting to run into the problem that I canāt exactly map everything into nice inboxes.Ā The second problem that Iām now facing is that not everything that I save maps into nice outboxes either.Ā The best tool to manage this so far has been FeedDemon.Ā Their folder structure for feeds,Ā watches and news bins makes sense, but IĀ am at the breaking point as the GTDesque āworkflowā that I have setup is needing to be reworked.Ā The only way I can see reworking it is to make sub categories under each of my meta categories.Ā To be honest, I think that FeedDemon will work just fine doing these things, but my overall workflow will need to change.
The second problem is that I am starting to run into the problem of never being able to be caught up on my reading.Ā I have now gotten into the habit of scanning articles, but I have found that this misses items.Ā There have been two solutions to this.Ā I have started to subscribe to linkblogs.Ā I wish more people would establish linkblogs and publish them.Ā These linkblogs are great as they allow me to see if there is anything āimportantā that I missed on my trip through the other blogs.Ā The other way I am managing this overload is that FeedDemon supports watches which is an automated way to collect information.Ā I think that over the coming months I will be expanding these watches to be more detailed and specific.Ā As this happens, I will need to subscribe to more generic feeds to feed these specific watches.Ā This of course is a force feedback loop that will increase complexity.
My final problem is that I have tried many of the applications out there for reading feeds and Iām starting to approach the breaking point of these applications.Ā I will keep posting over the coming months regarding how I am managing this, but I suspect that I will find a couple opportunities for improvement on the RSS reader side.
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