I'm not worthy... Excellent piece-very thorough. Learned a couple more tricks.
Lance Weber
· 2 years ago
Excellent recipe!
One of the best lifehacks I've adopted for my RSS feeds is the invariant use of a "probation" folder. Without exception, every new feed I add goes into this folder and has to pass my 30 day Are You Interesting? test to be moved into my regular folder set. This single practice is probably the number one secret in keeping a healthy signal-noise ratio.
Also, I have separate folders for "friends" and "alpha-geeks". I use the former for close personal friends and the latter for my "online tribe".
Attitude
· 2 years ago
Chris - I use Google Reader for all online media rss stuff. Never used the keyboard shortcuts. I'll check it out. Thanks.
UJ
· 2 years ago
As long as you're using Firefox, check out the Better GReader add-on. The expanded view is great for big monitors, but my favorite feature is that it adds a quick subscribe link to the top corner of pages with an RSS feed. Never search for that little orange square again!
Andrew Flusche
· 2 years ago
Chris, this is a great tutorial!
My one suggestion would be not to "mark all as read." I used to obsess over having my unread count at 0. It's been incredibly freeing to just let it say "100+" all the time. I know there's lots of stuff I haven't read in there. Just because I don't read it during one feed-sitting, that doesn't mean I won't read it later.
Plus, this way you can use Trends to see what you're actually reading. Then you can unsubscribe to feeds that never get consumed.
Great article! Andrew
Jim Stanger
· 2 years ago
When I started using Google Reader I added waaaaay too many feeds. Any site remotely interesting I'd capture it. It got to the point where I was treating Reader like a bookmark manager...one easy click and the site was in my feed river.
Before I knew it, though, I found the river I was navigating was more like the Mississippi than the Colorado....large and cumbersome. Scanning the feeds took more and more time, and I found myself scanning less often. There were a couple hundred easy, and I'm no Scoble speed feed reader. :-)
So, I've been spending time ditching feeds that, although interesting, I don't actually stop and read often. Leaner and meaner (below 100,) the signal to noise ratio is way up and Reader is back to being a great tool for centralizing my reading.
If I find I'm visiting a site more than once or twice I'll still add it. Others I log in Notebook for review during free time (choke!)...
Barlow Keener
· 2 years ago
Chris, This is really good information. I use Google Reader but not enough. Mainly going from Blog to Blog. I have really enjoyed your GTD blogs.
Marti
· 2 years ago
Very nice tutorial! I've been using "My Yahoo" but it messes up a lot. I'll give this a try - thanks!
rox
· 2 years ago
Screenshots make the difference! Thanks for taking the extra time to do that. I'll be pointing people here.
Doug Haslam
· 2 years ago
You are a mind-reader-- I went to Google Reader just this week after using Firefox Live Bookmarks for years. the main reason was that I could see where and when there were new posts. I could not bring myself to like BlogLines and never touched the other readers.
As for the Star-- I would recommend using it-- if you are skimming feeds and want to give an article a better going-through later, I do recommend starring it.
I still like the idea of having the feeds sorted in my browser sidebar so I can see them while browsing elsewhere. Wonder if Google Reader will/does do that?
Thanks!
Matthew Cornell
· 2 years ago
The killer feature that Reader is missing is something Bloglines has had for a while: The ability to create anonymous email accounts that you can use to pipe email-based subscriptions to a feed reader. I recommend this setup to clients so as to protect their email inbox...
kitykity
· 2 years ago
I use google reader religiously... but my method is a bit different than yours. I go to the main page, then click on "all items" to put all posts in one list ordered by time stamp, then hit u to hide the sidebar, then j j j j to scroll through the entries. :)
All Comments
One of the best lifehacks I've adopted for my RSS feeds is the invariant use of a "probation" folder. Without exception, every new feed I add goes into this folder and has to pass my 30 day Are You Interesting? test to be moved into my regular folder set. This single practice is probably the number one secret in keeping a healthy signal-noise ratio.
Also, I have separate folders for "friends" and "alpha-geeks". I use the former for close personal friends and the latter for my "online tribe".
My one suggestion would be not to "mark all as read." I used to obsess over having my unread count at 0. It's been incredibly freeing to just let it say "100+" all the time. I know there's lots of stuff I haven't read in there. Just because I don't read it during one feed-sitting, that doesn't mean I won't read it later.
Plus, this way you can use Trends to see what you're actually reading. Then you can unsubscribe to feeds that never get consumed.
Great article!
Andrew
Before I knew it, though, I found the river I was navigating was more like the Mississippi than the Colorado....large and cumbersome. Scanning the feeds took more and more time, and I found myself scanning less often. There were a couple hundred easy, and I'm no Scoble speed feed reader. :-)
So, I've been spending time ditching feeds that, although interesting, I don't actually stop and read often. Leaner and meaner (below 100,) the signal to noise ratio is way up and Reader is back to being a great tool for centralizing my reading.
If I find I'm visiting a site more than once or twice I'll still add it. Others I log in Notebook for review during free time (choke!)...
As for the Star-- I would recommend using it-- if you are skimming feeds and want to give an article a better going-through later, I do recommend starring it.
I still like the idea of having the feeds sorted in my browser sidebar so I can see them while browsing elsewhere. Wonder if Google Reader will/does do that?
Thanks!