RSS 101: Smarter, Faster Feed Reading

RSS feeds are supposed to be great time savers. They deliver the content from sites you read regularly, so your news and updates are all in the same place. No more manually checking every news site each morning!

The efficiency of RSS is also its downfall, though. If you subscribe to too many feeds, it’s easy to get sucked into reading for hours every day, when you should be working. Fortunately, there are ways to quickly and efficiently take your daily sip from the information firehose without drowning yourself.

Here’s my best advice for making the most of this glorious thing called RSS:

Get Google Reader

RSS veterans may disagree with me here, so they can feel free to ignore this tip and move on. If you’re just diving into the feed reading game, though, Google Reader is one of the easiest, most straightforward ways to get started, and it packs plenty of features to help you keep your subscriptions organized. Advanced users: you should consider Shaun Inman’s gorgeous Fever feed reader, provided you have some server space to install it.

Use Folders

Most RSS readers allow you to sort your subscriptions into folders, and you should take full advantage of this feature. I keep fashion and design sites in one folder,  friends’ blogs in another, and the all-important feeds I read for work in yet another folder. That way, when it’s time to get down to business, I can close up the folders I’m not reading to avoid distraction.

Prune Your Feeds Regularly

It’s no big deal if you want to subscribe to any old feed that looks interesting to you, just to give it a trial run. Periodically, though — perhaps when you do your weekly review? — you should go through your feeds and see which ones still have tons of unread items. Decide whether they’re really adding value to your life, and whether you feel it’s important to make time to read them. If the answer is no, unsubscribe swiftly.

Don’t Be Afraid to Mark All As Read

New items can come in fast and furious, especially when you’re subscribed to sites that post dozens of times a day. If you find yourself so hopelessly buried that you’re never going to catch up, just hit that “mark all as read” button and feel your stress melt away. If you find you’re doing this frequently, you may be oversubscribed, and you should consider making some tough calls about which sites you really need in your life.

These tips should get you off to a good start toward saving time with your RSS feeds instead of wasting it. I know many of our readers are probably RSS gurus,  so I’d also like to cover some more advanced tips in the future.

In the meantime, though, don’t forget to subscribe to the Task Blog RSS feed, and leave a comment and tell us a little bit about your own RSS habits!

Jay is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA. He writes about software for Download Squad and contributes interviews to Geek Monthly magazine, among others. You can also find him on Twitter and at his blog.

Photo — RSS Pillow from Throwboy

Tagged as: reading, rss, software, tips