Clean Out Your RSS Reader
As I stated in my RSS 101 article, RSS readers rock. Since I started using Google’s Reader I have greatly reduced the amount of time that I spent visiting my favorite websites to see if their content has changed, but as you already all know, everything positive has a negative, and that includes RSS readers.
By viewing some of my previous posts you can tell that I’m a big fan of original site design. I think that it helps to distinguish your site from the rest of the Internet. However, RSS feeds do not look anything like their counterpart on the actual website.
Therefore, by using an RSS Reader, you’re missing out on the aesthetics of the site and may not even catch updates to the site’s design unless the author blogs about it. The flip-side to that coin is that you should be visiting the sites in your RSS feed frequently to comment on the author’s posts anyway. If not, they probably shouldn’t be in your RSS reader.
The more important negative of using an RSS Reader is over-reading. I love to read what people in my niche are writing about, but if you subscribe to too many sites your RSS Reader is going to become bloated and you’ll spend more time reading content then developing your own. If you’re like me and using the Internet to generate income, you want to use your time effectively, so trim the unnecessary sites and move on.
When I first thought about doing this I was afraid that I would miss out on some Earth shattering post. But I realized that the “important” topics are covered by more than one site so I’m sure I’m not going to miss anything. I spent an hour this morning cleaning up my RSS feed, and was able to eliminate close to 100 sites from my list. Most of these sites have long since gone dormant, or the site’s author posts so infrequently, it might as well be dormant. If you’re new to RSS feeds and readers, subscribe to as many sites as you would like, but be sure to find a good balance between reading and everything else.
I use Netvibes and subscribe to a ridiculous amount of feeds, I really need to clean it up. Although Netvibes is great for a lot of feeds, I still spend way too much time in the morning going through hundreds of new posts.
Perhaps you might want to consider using Yahoo! Pipes to reduce the clutter if you’re really anxious about your RSS subscription list spiraling out of control.
What you can do is create a filter for every over-productive blog’s RSS and filter it by item title and/or description.
Furthermore, you can do what most RSS readers (Google Reader at least) are unable to aggregate multiple feeds into a single one. You could use Yahoo! Pipes to aggregate feeds of similar (and perhaps less prominent) blogs into as single feed.