Yesterday morning I decided it was time to actually do something that has been on my to-do list for quite some time, reset the way I am organizing my RSS feeds. I also decided to take things a step further than that and basically start over again with which feeds I am subscribed to. I was subscribed to about 250 feeds, and am currently working back in that direction, but I have cleaned out a large number of junk feeds.
I wanted to write a quick spot about how I decided to organize my feeds in the new environment, and compare that to what I was doing before. I should take a quick moment to mention that I use FeedDemon as my primary feed reader, and as I was in the process of making this big change yesterday NewsGator, the company that owns FeedDemon, announced that the new release of FeedDemon was now going to be free. Big news which I may write about later, but you can find out more about from Nick Bradbury or Greg Reinacker’s blog.
I started off my re-design for my feeds with a simple spreadsheet on Google Docs. I wanted to think about how the information should be organized before I got started. I decided, even before yesterday, that I wanted to get rid of the category method of organizing I was using and move towards more of a use based method of organizing. I used to have folders like blog, technology news, social technology blogs, and it goes on like that. My new method has a tiny bit of that because there were a couple of things I wanted to keep separate, but in general is based on how important that feeds content is to me.
You can see in the picture the categories I used and a bit about what goes in each. My main goals in this were to allow me to:
- Quickly find the most important feeds when I only had a little time to read stuff. Those can be found in my Daily Reads folder (which I actually called @Daily Reads to make sure it was always first).
- Subscribe to comment feeds for posts I really liked, or add feeds for special events like CES, and not have them clutter other views. This is what the conversations folder is for. I will typically and my favorite posts from things like the CES feeds to a clippings folder. When CES is over, or the interesting conversation in a blog post has run dry, I will unsubscribe from those feeds. FeedDemon has a great Dinosaurs report that you can run on a folder by folder basis to quickly list the feeds that have not updated in the last X days.
- Add lots of data to the personal meme tracker in FeedDemon without requiring me to sift through those feeds when reading. The Meme and News tracker are just this. I add big ticket feeds here to allow FeedDemon to collect lots of data, and then use the Popular Topics report to see what is hot in any given period of time. Mostly this is tracking tech news, but I do try and capture some gaming info.
The remainder of the new folders serve to compliment the folders I listed above. I like the media feeds separate because FeedDemon handles them so nicely, and I like the podcast feeds in their own area because I read and consume them in a very different manner. The probation feeds folder is where I am going to put things that I add but am not 100% sure that the content will be useful to me. I will cull through here on occasion and either move feeds to other folders or I will delete them. Active feeds pretty much holds everything else. The majority of my feeds are here.
The one last thing I wanted to mention is that as I am going through and resubscribing to feeds, I am also bookmarking the main page for that site or blog on Ma.gnolia. I am using the subscribed tag, and including a tag for the folder where the feed is located in addition to my normal tags. If you ever wanted to see which podcasts I was subscribed to you could look at the list of my subscribed+audio & video podcasts bookmarks. Not sure how useful that it, but Ma.gnolia does let you export a nice OPML from any search (not an OPML that will work in a feed reader though).
So there you have it, my new method for organizing feeds. Good luck to NewsGator with the decision to go free on their consumer products. If you have need of or interest in a feed reader you can do far worse than to check out these products. I should note that NewsGator is planning to track RSS usage/attention as part of this free offer. You can opt out if that bothers you.