RSS Cleanup

I decided to start the new month by doing some clean, in this case, cleaning up my RSS feeds. For a while now I've been using Feedbin as the "backend", to fetch the feeds from sources. I use Reeder 5, mainly on my iPad mini, but also sometimes on my phone and MacBook, to actually read said feeds. As a setup it works great, especially since from Reeder I can easily save links to Apple Notes if I want to refer to them later. But for a while I've been subscribed to too many feeds, many of which I don't read on a regular basis, and have accumulated a backlog that I'm not interested in going through. The way I organized feeds into folders had also become unsatisfactory, as I put new feeds into places that didn't quite work, or the content of the feeds changed. So I did a thorough cleanup of my feeds in a couple of steps:

Remove Broken, Silent and Uninteresting Feeds

First I went through my feeds and removed any feeds that were either broken, or simply had not received any updates in a long time. Feedbin makes the first part easy by showing which feeds are broken and offering to remove them at the click of a button. I then went through the feeds manually and removed feeds that hadn't updated in a while. I removed any feeds that hadn't updated in a year (so any time in 2023). Some of these had last updated in 2021, so there was really no reason to keep them around. I know that one of the benefits of RSS is that I don't miss updates from sites that only occasionally update. But for my feeds, I didn't see any that updated so infrequently and that I wanted to read. I did this step manually, but I realize now that Feedbin lets me sort feeds by both volume and last update when managing them. I could have used that to make this step faster. Finally, I removed feeds that I no longer find interesting. Most of them were random news sites, or personal blogs that I never actually read and aren't aligned with my interests at the moment.

This step reduced the number of feeds I was subscribed to from about 100 to about 70. That's almost a one-third reduction, and the completionist in me feels much better knowing that feeds I won't read are gone.

Reorganize Feeds into Folders

Both Feedbin and Reeder support simple organization (though the UI for both leaves much to be deserved). Feedbin calls them tags, and Reedbin calls them folders, but they work the same and seem to sync together without issue. I'm going to call them folders because that's how I think about and use them. I had a number of folders previously which made sense when I first came up with them. But over time they've become less useful, because either I've added feeds into folders whose names don't quite reflect what's in the feed, or the authors have changed what they post about, also making the folder names inaccurate.

I've ended up with the following folders:

• Academic for both blogs from fellow academics, as well as for sites that post long and in-depth articles backed by lots of thought and research.
• Daily for blogs that update more-or-less daily, or multiple times a day.
• People for blogs written by interesting individuals about things in their lives, usually spanning a range of topics.
• Philosophy for, well, philosophy, but also advice and self-help blogs.
• Programming for blogs that mostly post some kind of technical content, usually about computers, programming and related topics.
• Stationery for blogs related to stationery (pens, paper, notebooks and the like).
• Misc for feeds that don't neatly fit into any of the other categories.

This organization is imperfect. For example, Kottke.org, Scripting News, and a couple other personal blogs are under Daily, even though they're mostly written by one person and cover a range of topics. But this structure is good enough that I'm confident I won't feel the need to do a major re-arrangement in the near future.

Declare RSS Bankruptcy

For various reasons, I check my feeds much less frequently than I used to even a couple of years ago. It's not unusual for me to go a couple days without checking during the week, and then spending a couple hours reading over the weekend. As a result, a lot of the feeds have built up a backlog of posts that I will never actually get around to reading. So for a bunch of feeds, I declared "bankruptcy" and simply hit the "Mark All as Read" button. These are mostly the personal blogs that are updated daily, but also a number of the more technical blogs that I know I won't have the patience or desire to wade through. In the future, I'm hoping to have the courage to do this on a more regular basis.

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It took a couple hours to get through all of that, (including stopping to read some posts along the way). My feeds are now more indicative of my current interests, and I'm hoping that the re-organization will make it easier to read the most relevant things in the limited time I have for it. Did I need to do this? Not really, but I believe that we should pay some attention to what information we consume, just as we are careful of what food we eat.

In case you're interested in what I read, a list of my feeds is available as an OPML file. Yes, I realize the irony of posting about organizing my RSS feeds when this journal doesn't have an RSS feed, but I'm working on that.