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.
Starting over with feeds
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.