Managing RSS – How To Organise Feeds

January 14th, 2010

I read many blogs and websites every day. I consider it a massive fail if a site doesn’t have an RSS feed (I consider using feedburner important, especially if you’re in the world of marketing/tracking stats). Although the design of a website is important to me (yes those with blogspot default themes must be amazing for me to want to subscribe, or spent more than 20secs on).

I use Google Reader, and really like how it works. Most of how it works that is. One of the major downsides is how difficult it is to rename folders (or tags). As they are organised in alphabetical order, I put a number beside those I consider more of a priority. For instance, my folder for ‘Irish blogs’ is titled ’1 Irish blogs’ as I always read these first, followed by ’2 N. Ireland blogs’. I’m in the process of deciding how to organise the others for better priority reading too.

[I didn't realise folders could be re-ordered by simply dragging and dropping, thanks to Donal for letting me know.]

Yesterday, for no apparent reason, all my feeds were removed from their respective folders, with some folders disappearing altogether. And this was shortly after I had culled and organised my feeds (down to a manageable(?) 500). As frustrated as I was at the time, it makes renaming the folders a lot easier.

See guide to renaming Google Reader folders.

Dilemma now is, what order? I subscribe to many feeds, and under many categories. Which ones to read first? Which to read every day. Here are the categories I have:

Comics, design, freelancing, Irish Blogs, Northern Irish Blogs, Irish photoblogs, journalism, meta (Kottke, boing boing, digg etc), marketing, movies, music, news (mainstream), photographers, photography (news etc), photo blogs, science, technology.

How do you organise your RSS reader? What folders do you use? Do you have a folder for those you read first or must read on a daily basis?
Would you suggest a better RSS reader to Google (not that I really want to change, but open to suggestions).

Thanks for stopping by, you can subscribe to my RSS feed or keep in touch via Twitter.

Tagged: Google, Internet, tech | 5 comments »

5 Comments

Glad to see that someone else is driving Google Reader hard but finding it wanting in some simple admin tasks. Not wanting to look too anal, but I too have a namig scheme. Some blogs appear in two categories.

* Alan et al – covers my blog, family and Flickr comment feed
* Comments – if I subscribe to the comments for a post (or occassionally a blog) it goes in here.
* Irish blogs
* Media (official) and Media (personal) – for corporate blogs and then personal ones from corporate people
* Northern Irish blogs
* Other contacts – the international section
* Politics
* Religion
* Techie stuff
* UK blogs
* Unknown – blogs I’ve picked up but am not sure how
* zzz Delete – blogs I’m minded to ditch but can’t quite face it, or am only reading for a couple of days, and also acts as a bulk folder for blogs that churn out too many posts to clutter up the proper category

Simple … glad to have got that off my chest! Might pay you to come round and cull some feeds! Do you think anyone would give us jobs in a library?

Posted by Alan in Belfast on 14 Jan 2010 at 3:42 pm Reply to this comment

@Alan in Belfast – Thanks for that Alan. As well as having a few geographically-specific categories, some of those are even coming into their own and I’m feeling a need to split them (eg. Irish marketing/pr).

It’s a tricky thing to master, but something I’m determined to do as I add rss to reader rather than bookmarking sites most often.

Posted by Phil on 14 Jan 2010 at 3:52 pm Reply to this comment

In case you’re not aware of this, Google Reader folders do not have to listed alphabetically. They can also be listed by ‘drag and drop’ but you have to change the setting.

To change the setting, click on ‘Navigation’ and then go down to the Subscriptions section in the Navigation panel. Click on the little blue ‘down’ arrow on the right hand side. Then click on ‘Sort by drag and drop’. Personally I wouldn’t go back to alphabetical!

I tend to avoid labelling feeds twice as other feed readers don’t always support this so it could cause problems when switching down the road.

I started using Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com) as well recently as I found Reader was a bit awkward for high-volume feeds. Like Reader, it has mobile access but unlike Reader, the mobile version of Bloglines allows you to go back over stuff that you’ve already marked as read. Subscribing to high-volume feeds via iGoogle (http://www.google.ie/ig) is also a good solution.

I used a desktop feed reader called FeedDemon for a while that synchronised with Google Reader and allows extra feeds as well, but I found it slow and was a bit of a memory hog. Online seems to be the way to go!

Posted by Donal on 14 Jan 2010 at 7:06 pm Reply to this comment

@Donal – Thanks for that Donal – not sure how I didn’t notice it before. It must be fairly new, or at least since I last checked and started adding a number to the label.

Posted by Phil on 14 Jan 2010 at 7:12 pm Reply to this comment

By the way, my folders broadly reflect the category of what’s in them – so I have a few folders for different types of Flickr content, Photography Blogs, Tech Blogs, Political Blogs, Events Blogs, etc. I only have 38 subscriptions in Reader though. ;)

Posted by Donal on 14 Jan 2010 at 7:26 pm Reply to this comment

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