I have a love hate relationship with RSS. With Twitter so popular these days, I tend to pick up all my news items from that. Anything I want to read right away I do. I’ll then either bookmark it to Delicious for reference later, or just close and that’s it. If I come across an article I want to read but for whatever reason can’t at that exact moment, I send it to Instapaper. Once read on Instapaper, if it’s good I’ll star it and then bookmark it if I feel it needs to, or I’ll just delete them.
With the purchase of a Kindle, this has worked exceptionally well for me. Instapaper lets you download your items to Kindle, so I’ve been doing that and reading when I can, before logging in to Instapaper and organising everything. (PS - if Instapaper could add a ‘Save to Delicious’ button, I would love it).
I always used to use RSS though and decided that I should check it out again. I’m told that ‘Reeder’, the insanely popular iPhone & iPad RSS app is now going to be released for Mac OS X in the future, something I’m very much looking forward to. Until then, I’ll stick to Google Reader - although I’m going to scout around for some apps. I logged in and had over 1000 new items from 157 different sources on my Google Reader account.
So what did I do?
I deleted every single feed.
Blank canvas, new leaf, etc.
So I’m going to continue going as I do, using Twitter, but then if a website continuously pops up during this process, say 5+ times in a relatively short space of time (2/3 weeks perhaps), then it’s worthy of a place in my RSS. But I’m going to be ruthless. I’m tired of how I used to do things - log in, 300 unread items, sort them all out. I used to have around 300 unread per day before I cut my sources down to 150. Now I want just the select few. The best of the best of the best.
