BABB-14: Prune Your RSS Feed Subscriptions

March 14th, 2008 · 5 Comments ·

Today is Day 14 of the Be A Better Blogger series. We’re using the outline offered by Collis Ta’eed in his article titled 31 Days To Becoming A Better Blogger, and our topic for the day is:

Day 14. Prune your feed subscriptions. I suspect some bloggers spend as much time reading feeds as they do writing posts. Pruning your feed collection can help you save quite a bit of time. If you find yourself regularly skipping feed items from a particular blog, or if you can’t think of one thing you’ve learned from reading a particular blog’s posts, it’s probably best if you unsubscribe…

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This is a good exercise to do every few months, as your feed reader can easily get cluttered with feeds you dont end up reading regularly. You should also use directories to organize your feeds into subcategories so that you can easily locate the topics or blogs you need to access - whether you are sitting down to browse blogs of personal interest, or looking for blog posts to reference in your work.

I’m curious how many of you actually use a feed reader, and which one you use. During last week’s webinar I did a casual poll on how the participants read my blog - the response was varied almost evenly between browser, email subscription and feed reader.

Regardless of how you manage your incoming information, its easy to find yourself drowning in it. For today’s task, I’ll refer you back to one of my archives: Stop The Information Overload Madness.

The task for the day is to prune your feeds down to the cream of the crop, and I would recommend doing the same in your Inbox.

Just dont prune ClickNewz while you’re at it

Tags: RSS & Blogging

5 responses so far ↓

Katherine Reschke // Mar 14, 2008 at 9:54 am

I use the feedreader in Outlook - that means I can check on any new blogposts at the same time as checking my email. I do regularly prune feeds.
TzuVelli.com // Mar 15, 2008 at 5:33 am

I used to read about 300 feeds. That is I used to spend hours skimming the titles. A few weeks ago I trimmed that back to about 100. I used to feel completely overwhelmed. What was really frustrating was that a lot of the feeds had little substance to them. So, it was basically a waist of my time. Now, I feel like I am using my time more wisely.

Beau
Linda Stacy // Mar 15, 2008 at 9:37 am

I recently pruned my feeds. With hundreds of posts waiting to be read I had to admit that I was never going to get to them. I kept thinking I’d find the time someday. I’m much worse about email mailing lists. There are way too many unread messages there. Time to weed……
Kelly // Mar 16, 2008 at 2:16 am

Lynn, I dig a big ‘blah blah’ pruning last week and have enjoyed the lack of ‘blah’ in my RSS reader ever since

I used to use feedreader but when I turned into a dual-computer user I moved everything to the web and now use Google Reader to track my favorite blogs.

This is especially handy for reading feeds via my Blackberry.

And I’d never prune ClickNewz!
Lynn Terry // Mar 18, 2008 at 4:57 pm

Thank you Kelly LOL

Sounds like you guys are right on track with this one - cool! It seems I’m always having to do more pruning.