kottke.org home archives + xml about kottke.org contact me
kottke.org - home of fine hypertext products

Feed reading

Warning, RSSoterica and kottke.org sausage-making to follow. Matt Wood has a post up on 43Folders about how he groups his RSS feeds in Google Reader for easier reading. I use pretty much the same system as Matt, but with a few more folders. I have several folders for reading long-form blogs:

Always
Often
Sometimes
Pending
Food and Drink
Frippery
Infoglut

Always, Often, and Sometimes are self-explanatory. The Pending folder is for blogs that I'm trying out, Frippery is stuff that is non-kottke.org-related to be read during non-work hours (ha!), and the Infoglut folder contains a bunch of blogs that have a low signal-to-noise ratio and are too high volume to keep up with unless everything else is read (any multi-author pro blogs that I read (not many) are in here). For organizing non-long-form blogs, I use these folders:

Links
Yummy
Photos
Tumble

Links contains link blogs, Yummy has a bunch of stuff from del.icio.us, Photos are photoblogs, and Tumble contains tumblelogs, FFFFOUND!, and other Randomly Curated Other People's Images White Background Sites. And then for news, I have an NY Times folder, a Sci/Tech News folder, and a Keywords folder for Google News keyword searches.

All this folder business might seem overcomplicated, but I find that grouping feeds by mode helps greatly. And by mode, I mean when I'm reading link blogs, that's a different style than reading/skimming long-form blogs in the Always folder. Posts from link blogs usually take a few seconds to read/evaluate/discard while the Always folder posts take longer. If they were all lumped together, I couldn't get through them as quickly and thoroughly as I can separately. A juggling analogy will help -- Wait! Don't leave, I'm almost done! -- it's easier to juggle balls or clubs or knives than it is to juggle balls, knives, and clubs at the same time...same thing with different kinds of blog posts.

More about this page

This entry was published in December 2007.

Tags for this entry:  rss  kottkedotorg  weblogs 

kottke.org is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998. You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or an interesting link for me, send them along. Here's the kottke.org RSS feed kottke.org RSS feed.

Advertisement

dot dot dot

Advertise on kottke.org via The Deck.

Looking for work? Tags, tags, tags!

Many posts on kottke.org have been "tagged" with keywords, which activity results in collections of related posts like sports, infoviz, or bestof.

Recently popular tags (last 3 weeks)

twitter   video   photography   automobiles   parody   nasa   conferences   fashion   architecture   design   iphone   remix   baseball   food   nyc

All-time popular tags

movies   photography   books   nyc   science   food   lists   design   business   sports   video   weblogs   music   bestof   art

Some of my favorite tags

photography   economics   lists   bestof   infoviz   food   nyc   firstworldproblems   cities   restaurants   video   timelapse   interviews   language   maps   fashion   nsfw   remix  

Random tags

sunshine   prison   cities   barcade   marypoppins   lifeafterpeople   realestate   cars   fundraising   hosseinderakhshan   fridakahlo   sony   pentagram   movies   im

kottke.org

You're visiting kottke.org. All content by Jason Kottke (contact me) unless otherwise noted, with some restrictions on its use. Good luck will come to those who dig around in the archives. If you've reached this point by accident, I suggest panic.