Ignore Updated Posts
One of the easiest ways I’ve found to increase my efficiency and double my productivity is to Ignore Updated Posts. If you have an RSS reader, and you read as many (okay, maybe not that many) blogs as I do, you probably already understand what I mean. If you don’t, let me expandiate a bit…
First off, for this to be of any use, you’ll need an RSS reader. I recommend BlogLines, and I have no affiliation with the company beyond using their product.
Once you’ve got your Bloglines account, you can subscribe to RSS feeds. The most common places that offer RSS feeds are weblogs (like this one!). When you go to subscribe to a weblog (or any other RSS) source, do yourself a favor and change the box in BlogLines that says “Updated Items: Display as New” to “Updated Items: Ignore.” (Your results may vary depending on the RSS reader you’ve chose)
But! - you say - you’ll miss all the updates that people are putting up related to their latest and greatest posts! Calm down - I say - if the information is really that important that they needed to provide an update, then either you’ll find it from another source, or it’s not that important. If it really was that important, they’d have created a new post to inform you of the update.
But - you repeat - what about bloggers who actually do update their posts? Well, hopefully we can teach them a lesson. I don’t like having to look through a post to find what’s been updated after I’ve already read the post once. Even if it’s an update clearly labelled as such at the bottom of the post, it’s usually not important enough to justify being shown again in my RSS reader.
On a related note… I have found (after trying quite a few others) BlogLines to be the fastest way to read weblogs. Desktop newsreads are often competitively fast, but they usually still require you to click on each item in order to mark it as read and/or delete it. BlogLines can automatically mark every blog you “expand” as read, which is a killer time saver in enabling you to quickly scan and move on.
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