It all started when NewsGator discontinued their sync service. I had been using NetNewsWire as my main feed reader for awhile, having left Google Reader a couple of years ago. Since NewsGator is discontinuing that service, NNW will now be syncing with Google Reader. When I set that up, it added all my NNW feeds to my old list of Google Reader feeds and created a huge mess.
At that point, I had two options. I could go through the merged list of feeds and figure out which ones I wanted to keep and ferret out all of the duplicates, or I could just toss out all of my feeds and start over.
My deeper problem, which I’ve been in a bit of denial about, is that I never actually caught up with all of the feeds I subscribed to. There are a few I read every day, but there are a lot that languished and that I wind up just marking as read.
So I decided to start over. I exported the subscription list from Google Reader, unsubscribed from everything, and deleted all my folders. Then I started adding feeds back from memory, one by one. Right now I’m up to 24 subscriptions, but I’ve only been adding them for a day or two. It’ll be interesting to see how many feeds wind up in my subscription list, I imagine it’ll never again be the hundreds I once followed.
This is hardly an original sentiment — I’ve read of a number of people moving away from subscribing to feeds as a way to follow news lately. I don’t think that’s going to be me, but I am excited to tailor my feed reading more closely to my current habits and actually reading each item from the feeds rather than blowing through most of them just to try to catch up.
August 13, 2009 at 12:05 pm
I’ve been using Fever recently. It lets you split your feeds in to two groups. One group you actually read, the other is there solely to contribute to a ‘hot links’ page. I ended up putting a bunch of feeds that once in a blue moon are good in that second group. This way, stories that a lot of different people are linking too still bubble to the top.
August 13, 2009 at 2:16 pm
second recommendation for Fever. i love it.
August 13, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Why had you dumped Google Reader? Are there “must have” features in other feed readers that I’m missing out on?
August 13, 2009 at 4:33 pm
I had dumped Google Reader mainly to get the speed and responsiveness of a desktop application, plus the dock icon. It is also nice to be able to open tabs in NetNewsWire and just leave them there for later reading.