Organizing and Prioritizing Your Feeds
January 3rd, 2008 by Michael Gray in ToolsIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
A few weeks ago I saw a post on Sphinn about organizing your feeds with a three dimensional approach. I use something similar but with a trick I learned from GTD.
I like to sort my feeds by importance and categories. First I’ll put things into category based folders like SEO, Travel, Disney, Celeb News etc. Next I’ll set up special folders for high priority stuff like ego tracking, client tracking, client feeds ETC. If I’m pressed for time I only check these everything else can wait. Next I have aggregators type feeds where I just scan the headlines to see if there is something I want to read. These are the lowest priority I only scan them when I have finished all my work or are killing time. So ideally I want to go through the priority stuff first, then the regular feeds and lastly the scan feeds. Since 99% of feed readers force you use alpha sorting this is problematic. Here’s my solution …
Put the @ sign in front of the priority stuff first @me, @client, @company, etc so the important stuff is now first. Now to put the scan stuff last I use a “Z” like Z-seo, Z-social, Z-widgets, and so on.
This helps keeps thing in order and organized, now if only Google reader would work with folders on my mobile phone …
Sphere It
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:07 am
I was putting numbers before the feeds to put them in their “correct place”.
But, with Google Reader’s new “Manual Sorting” feature, life is definitely easier…
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:37 pm
For a while I dumped dozens of feeds into “Digg This” folder where I subscribed to a LOT of Google News & Blog Alerts for generic but sensational headlines that contained words like “Tragic” “Awful” “Amazing” “Incredible” “Explosion” “Near Death” “Scandalous” “Eye Popping” “Gory” “Gruesome” “Caught on tape” “Busted” “Inferno” “Trapped” “Feared Dead” “Plot” “Insane” and things like that.
I got hundreds of Digg worthy articles delivered to me daily via RSS but never had the time to submit as much as I would have liked.
Here is a tip: Query Google Blog Search for something like “amazing photo” (with quotes) but block Digg and other websites from the results so you don’t get as many items that have already been hyped or submitted. [ "amazing photo" -digg.com ] Then… Use the Digg-This plug-in for Firefox to tell if the story has already been submitted.
Aloha,
Dave.
January 4th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Great advice Michael, I’m getting to the point where 100+ subscriptions is getting out of hand. Prioritizing them this way will definitely make it easier to find the best stuff.
January 6th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Not sure if you saw, but you can drag/drop your folders in Google Reader now if you want..
January 6th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
yea but dropping and dragging doesn’t affect the order, I know it’s minor but when multiplied over hundreds of feeds every day the little inefficiencies add up