Smarter Feed Reading

For a while, one of the biggest time-wasters I had at my disposal (a bad thing for a person with A.D.D. and a penchant for procrastination) was syndication feeds. Obviously, that’s no longer the case or I wouldn’t be writing this.

The most important part was actually one of those “common sense is anything but common” rules. In this case, it was to take a step back and ask “do I really need this?” for each feed. You’d be surprised how many feeds I dropped just by doing that.

The second step was to realize that, as someone with A.D.D., having a feed reader as a tray icon wasn’t a very smart move. In the end, I ended up using Google Reader with iGoogle to provide a quick way to check both my feeds and my e-mail. (I use GMail)

With the decision to check for updates as less of an impulse action, it became more obvious that time and attention were being wasted elsewhere. My first goal was to make more extensive use of Feed43.com (a free site for generating RSS feeds for sites which don’t already have them) and, while puttering around with that, I discovered my second goal. (via google… ain’t it great? :P)

FeedRinse.com is a little gem that used to have a paid premium version but is now completely free. It’s purpose is to let you customize feeds by filtering out entries you don’t want, merging multiple feeds into a single one, or both. I use it to strip advertising and podcast announcements from feeds where I don’t want to see them. (Once again, distraction is a big problem for me)

Good luck. I hope you find these sites as useful as I have.

Smarter Feed Reading by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.