I am 856 messages behind on my rss/blog/journal/newsfeed folder.
I think this means that I need a new approach to reading (or "not reading") them.Unsubscribe from as many high volume feeds as you can stand to. If any remain, hit “mark all as read” and don't even try to catch up. I have about 60 feeds in my aggregator, but they're almost exclusively slow-moving blogs and low-volume article-oriented sites, so I'm never more than two or three dozen items behind. Following just three high-volume neewsfeeds was 10× as stressful as following 60 low-volume blogs is.
And the great thing is all these people in my blogroll work for me as filters — I still don't miss the really cool stuff worth noticing, because it will pop up on someone's blog anyway! I just don't waste so much time with all the chaff anymore. I see a greater diversity of cool stuff, and it's usually delivered with an opinion piece or pithy remark. That makes it much more interesting than constantly absorbing a tidal wave of raw information. Occasionally I peek into some of those high-volume sites and randomly pick things that pique my interest to see if I can contribute some preprocessing back to the pool.
Re:How I deal with it
ask on 2004-09-20T01:27:47
Yeah, what Aristotle said.
I've been using the jabrss thing lately. It really sucks with high-volume feeds as they overwhelm everything else, but when all the feeds are lower volume it's great. One of the reasons it's great is that if I don't have time to read something it'll just be gone, so I'm never beind -- I just miss stuff. (And that's really how it should be).
- ask
