Thursday, March 16, 2006

Maintaining the Accumulation
Posted by Sam at 3:50 PM | tags: ,

I don't exactly know how it happens. It's definitely not intentional, but it gets out of hand, quickly... becomes unmanageable, instantly. It'll happen to you too. It happens to the best of us... the most diligent and meticulous of readers. It's the accumulation of blogs. Yep. It's the heaping piles of blogs congesting the ol' feed reader. And, as with my housemate's hair clogging the drain, you gotta stick your finger in there and remove the crunk every now and again.

The following is my theory of why/how the congestion happens. Let's call it The Theory of Blog Crunk Accumulation (henceforth referred to as TTOBCA (henceforth pronounced as tobca (henceforth not mentioned again in this post))): You read one interesting article from a potentially interesting blog and you think, "hey, this dude might have something worthwhile to say. I think I'll add this blog to my feed reader." And then, that dude never posts anything of value ever again. Yet, that dude continues to post. And post. And post. And you continue to read the first three sentences of that dude's posts and ignore the rest. This pattern drags on, and all of a sudden, you find yourself amidst a vicious cycle of adding blogs, half reading blogs, and ignoring blogs.

So now it's time to participate in a little spring cleaning. Currently, I subscribe to 204 blogs (yet, I'm a dedicated reader of maybe only 60 or 70 of those). When I wake up in the morning and check my feeds (yes, it is the first thing I do in the morning. Yes, before I pee. Yes, before coffee. Any other questions?), I can have anywhere from 200 to 400 posts to thumb through. That's way too many (I mean, sometimes I have to pee really badly. There's been times that I've nearly wet the bed just trying to get through the morning's news). I'm likely to miss something important while I'm ignoring something trivial.

And so, it's time to embark on a little blog pruning. I've got my overalls on, gardening gloves at my side, and pruning shears at the ready. My goal: a concise, manageable 100 blog subscriptions. Wish me luck.

As an aside (or more accurately, a below), I wonder how many reader's subscription lists sam bot dot com is guilty of clogging up. None, I'm sure. I mean, when have I ever blogged about anything less than extraordinarily fascinating? (The answer you're looking for is "never.")

Comments: 3 | Post a Comment | Permalink

Wow. I currently subscribe to 50 newsfeeds and that seems like way too many. I can only imagine what it must be like to sift through a couple hundred. Happy pruning!

Comment By TheDarkLordDerfla on March 16, 2006 4:05 PM

no wonder you always seem like you have so much work...with so many feeds do you even GET to work???

Comment By bryan on March 16, 2006 8:32 PM

God, this blog is always clogging up my RSS. Oops, did I type that out loud?

Seriously, Sam, the quantity might not be the problem. Have you tried the google feedreader? It has some handy functions...

One of my favorites is that you tag blogs with their theme. Like news, friends, apple.. whatever.

When I initially log in I see a long list of all the latest posts out of the full 100+ blog list. The first thing I do is click on the friends tag... so I'll only see the latest posts by folks I actually know. After that it just depends on what mood I'm in: news, gadgets, politics, apple... whatever. With a click I only see headlines from blogs related to only that. When organized like this, more seems to be better as it's a never ending newspaper. You will probably never read most of the posts whose headlines that go through the reader (unless they have a tag you are careful to read fully) but you don't need to.

More is better... but crap is still crap, so it's easy to unsubscribe too. If you read a blogpost so bad you don't want to read any more you just click unsubscribe on that post and it's done. I do have a warning about this... by some curious software quirk, if you try to unsubscribe from my blog , your computer will blow up.
~Micah

Comment By Micah MacAllen on March 20, 2006 12:21 PM

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Sam Who!?
Sam is an amazing and humble guy. Once, he rushed into a burning building, up six flights of stairs to save a kitten from certain death. He speaks eight languages, has mastered three varieties of martial arts, is a wine expert, and is a pulitzer prize winning author. Sam is an international heart-throb who prefers a quiet evening at home knitting afghans for the homeless, to the go-go, glitz and glamor of the party scene. I think the day he won the silver medal for ballroom dancing at the 98 olympics was the happiest of his life. Pretty impressive for a guy who never finished the 8th grade. - Carrie, 04
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