Nov 25, 2008
RSS Runts
I have way too many feeds in my RSS reader—more blogs than I could read every day even before I had twins. Today I decided, screw it, I'm going to find one feed that I skip over every time, and just unsubscribe. I'm tired of the "mark all read" button in Google Reader.
To my surprise, I realized that the first candidate to go was Slashdot. Does this mean that I've completed my transformation from "tech guy" to "policy guy"? What does it mean that I just don't care if Ubuntu is getting slower?
But enough about me. Discussion topic! What detritus does your RSS reader contain? What blogs did you used to enjoy but now find boring? What did you subscribe to and never read?
To my surprise, I realized that the first candidate to go was Slashdot. Does this mean that I've completed my transformation from "tech guy" to "policy guy"? What does it mean that I just don't care if Ubuntu is getting slower?
But enough about me. Discussion topic! What detritus does your RSS reader contain? What blogs did you used to enjoy but now find boring? What did you subscribe to and never read?
I recently dropped Reiss’ Pieces (the Globe football blog), but mostly because they switched from full post posts to excerpts. Some other recent cuts… Wow, it’s hard to think of what I’ve been ignoring all this time… I can’t think of any.
Over the last several months, I’ve been operating in a RSS feed deficit, getting too many posts per day to get through, sometimes the deficit would get over 1K posts long. I’d eventually catch up on a Sunday only to fall in the hole again the next week and not be able to get out for weeks on end.
I remember thinking during the election that the political blogs would be posting less and that would be healthier for me, but it hasn’t happened yet. I feel like I need to cut 50-70 posts a day from my feed but I don’t know how. Won’t someone talk some sense into me!
FWIW, I’m still very much a “tech guy” and I’ve never found /. very interesting. I really need to drop my subscription to lifehacker. 15-20 posts/day about how to simplify your life is kind of missing the point, IMO.
Lifehacker has some different feeds that allow you to only get a couple a week, or even one a week. There’s a features one and then a “This Week’s Best Posts”. I switched to that one and I’ve never been more productive. Well. I don’t miss all the posts. I wish some of the other Gawker blogs, or well all other blogs would post a weekly highlight feed.
Good to know – I’ll have to check that out. Should be easier than my original idea of creating a new blog called lifehackerhacker that summarizes all of lifehacker’s content.