Celine Roque wrote a great article about how to fine tune your RSS subscriptions and prune them down to the feeds that provide you with the most value. I spent some time over the Thanksgiving holiday reviewing my feeds and getting rid of the poor performers, which really helps me get more value while spending less time in my RSS reader. However, pruning is not enough. I also use quite a few filtering techniques to further reduce the clutter.
My favorite filtering techniques involve Yahoo Pipes, which looks and sounds much more complicated than it is. Jackson West described Yahoo Pipes pretty well when he called them “hard to grok, but snazzy“; however, Yahoo Pipes doesn’t have to be quite so difficult for people to understand. The first time I looked at Pipes, the interface scared me away until a friend of mine gave me a very quick demo that showed how easy it was to use. After using Pipes for while, I gave similar demos to help other friends get started and even recorded a 2 minute introduction to Yahoo Pipes that shows how to use Pipes to filter RSS feeds. How complicated could it be if I can explain it in a 2 minute screencast?
Here are a few of my favorite filtering techniques that I use to find the most relevant content. Read the rest of this entry »
According to a survey in 2005, only 12% of internet users know what RSS feeds are. Despite these low numbers, most of the netizens I know seem to be active subscribers.
While RSS feeds give us the latest news, blog posts, and site updates through a single interface, it’s not farfetched to think that they can also be a major time suck. If you notice that this is happening, that you’re spending more time on your feed reader than you want to, then perhaps it’s time to quit your feed reader altogether.
Or you know, you can just fine-tune your subscription list
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As Web Workers, it may be hard for us to believe but a good portion of the population either has no idea what an RSS feed is or how to access them, or are just more comfortable with their email. Even our own Aliza Sherman recently shared her RSS fears.
She overcame hers but for those folks who haven’t jumped on the RSS bandwagon, their subscription options can be a bit limited. The problem is that while a lot of sites offer an alternate option to subscribe via email, many do not.
Enter Feed My Inbox - a very cool service that lets you subscribe to any RSS feed and receive it at your preferred email address.
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If you are looking for a new way to “nibble” on your news, you can try Snackr, an Adobe AIR-based app that creates a ticker across the bottom of your computer screen that teases random articles and blog posts from RSS feeds of your choice. The app works on both OS X and Windows.
Once installed, the Snackr user interface is nothing more than a plus sign where you add feeds; an icon for options including manually adding and removing feeds and changing feed preferences such as the ticker speed and placement; an icon to expand or collapse your ticker, and an X to quit the app. Tiny, compact, virtually unobtrusive. Read the rest of this entry »
About a week ago, I posted about Needing a Gentle Intro to RSS Feeds. I mentioned that I would read my RSS feeds through Google Reader over breakfast while my husband reads the paper and would let you know how I fared.
I know it has only been a week, but here are my first impressions about the impact reading feeds is having on my life and work.
1. They make me look smarter. Over the past week, I used Tweetburner to immediately post what I was reading when I was reading it to my Twitter page. On those mornings that I was immersed in feeds, I think I looked smart and informed. Either that or crazy or not busy enough actually getting work done. Read the rest of this entry »
Just read Mike Gunderloy’s post Times: Looks Aren’t Everything. One thing he said really stuck out for me…
Times is worth looking at, though, if you’re trying to gently introduce someone new to a few RSS feeds.
He’s talking about me, I thought, as I read that line. He knows my secret. And now you will know it, too.
I am terrified of RSS feed readers.
You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. I have no problem saving feeds to my reader of choice - Google Reader - but have no idea how to get started with actually reading any of them. And using Google Reader is nothing more than a knee jerk choice based on using several other Google applications and finding them to be useful. But actually reading something in Google Reader?
(Cue the horror movie music - you know, the one that plays when the mutant serial killer is coming up behind the heroine.) Read the rest of this entry »
WordPress, the open source blog management software, has released version 2.5 of their popular web application. WordPress has been quickly adopted because it presents a very flexible and easy to manage web publishing system. Out of the box it is a fully functional blog management system, but can also be used as a content management system (CMS) for a website as well.
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In a syndication world we are often overwhelmed with information. It is incredible that information once far away has been brought near, but we need to find some order for the chaos. There are a few ways that I’ve learned to manage my reading material to be digested in an organized manner.
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