I’m a believer

I currently have 59 feeds in my OPML file. 4 of those are planet feeds with x number of feeds each, so the total is easily over 100. If I don’t catch up with my feeds every day or so, I soon get overwhelmed and end up marking a batch as read without even looking at them. To make sure I wasn’t letting them pile up I was reading them far too many times a day.

Many, many places covered how Scoble reads over 600 feeds a day, and I ignored it at first. Then more sites covered it, and I started thinking about my own feed reading habits and decided to follow Hackzine’s advice:

OK so I didn’t start wearing my underpants on the outside to satisfy the last one, but the rest did help. Instead of reading my feeds in their categories with the list view (and using a mouse!), viewing all items in the expanded view and relying on the keyboard makes getting through my feeds a breeze. I now set aside a block of time a day to catch up on feeds and have them done in record time.

One tip not covered by Scoble is the use of starring, or rather how I use them. Instead of following links whilst I’m reading, I star an item I want to follow up on and come back to them later (remembering to remove the star when I’m done. If the feed item is just a stub to the real thing, I’ll open it in a new tab in the background (yay Firefox!) and move on, only moving away from Google Reader when I’m done.

The other tip I picked up from Scoble is to share items, which works really well when combined with the Google Reader Shared Items Facebook app.

A change is a good as a rest

Out with the old, in with the not-so-new.

I’ve been a long-term user of Bloglines. I loved being able to access my feeds from any computer, including my PDA. The PDA is no more, I got annoyed that you couldn’t read individual articles, and after stumbling across Liferea I switched. I switched because I could read individual articles, and I was now only using one computer on a regular basis.

I didn’t run into any glaring issues with Liferea, but because I make heavy use of tabs in Firefox I never became comfortable with having my feed reader outside my browser.

The news that Google Reader now supported the Wii Internet Channel piqued my curiosity and I decided to sample their wares once again.

So far I am liking it – they’ve improved the interface since I tried it last. I’ve not tried it through the Wii, nor from my mobile, but it is nice to know the functionality is there if I want it.

OK, so it is not really any different to using Bloglines but at this point I’ll refer you back to the title of this entry…

New Feed

Inspired by Elliot I’ve added my Ruby on Rails related posts to RubyCorner.

I subscribe to quite a few planet-style feeds, and I don’t mind the odd off-topic post, but a disproportionate number of personal posts to a planet that’s technical in nature soon winds me up.

So I’m not going to inflict the same on others.