Two Minute Offense

Nev n Dave are following up their tips with an example of how to categorize your feeds in BlogLines.

Since Nev showed what he was using as categories, I thought I’d post mine as well. They’re a little more creative than the “1 Priority” “2 Priority” system he’s got going on…

The Daily Dashes: These are the most important. I want to read them as soon as there is a post there.
-Daily
-Fantasy Basketball

Alphabetical: It took a little creative thinking to come up with the names so they’d sort in the right order.
A-List
Good Reads
Not That Important
Weekly

Bottom of the Heap:
Zero T (for Zero Tolerance, aka Quarantine)
Ziatus (Blogs that I might want to reinstate later, but for now, I can skip them)
Zonked (Blogs that I don’t want to read any more, but I don’t want to “forget” that I was once subscribed to them)

Basketball: I’ve also got a few basketball specific categories (like the Fantasy Basketball above).
Basketball - 01 - News (where I put all the “official” hoops news feeds)
Basketball - 02 (the basketball blogs that I enjoy reading)
Basketball - 03 (mostly everything else)
Summaries/Partials - Basketball (feeds that only provide a summary feed - aka Not Worth Looking At)

10 tips that are BRILLIANT!

My favorite:

9. Add an ‘ignore’ category for blogs that you no longer read - this helps you remember your decision. If you ever come across the blog in the future and think “ooh, I’ll add that to my aggregator”, you’ll see that it’s something you decided wasn’t worth your time.

This should have been number 1 on their list! Okay maybe not… but it’s important to me since I feed I’ve already done a pretty good job of optimizing my feeds. This was one technique that I hadn’t thought of for a problem that I do have sometimes.

My second favorite:

7. Organise your categories not by topic (tech, java, games, news etc) but by importance and/or reading frequency.
Example categories:
Important/Must Read
Daily - blogs you check daily
Every monday - blogs you check every monday
Every friday
Weekly
Monthly
etc

I have so many basketball feeds that I finally ended up doing this last week with them… I haven’t gotten around to doing it with the rest of my feeds, but I may have to soon…

And the bronze medal goes to:

Add a ‘quarantine’ category for new blogs that you’re adding to your aggregator. After a week or so, decide whether you really want to keep that blog and move it to the appropriate category.

I have already implmented this one in my BlogLines. I called the folder Zero T (for Zero Tolerance). That way it appears all the way at the bottom of my feed folders, so I only get to read it when I’m done with everything else.

This is probably old news for true GTD/Time management folks… but Bloglines now has Hotkey you can use to navigate your feeds. Yeah, it makes things go a lot faster. Use the hotkeys. Be the hotkeys.

They still have a bit of a problem with the “Keep As New” feature, but to work around that problem, I just save things to my Clippings instead of trying to check them to Keep As New. You can even organize your clippings into folders and then read only the subjects you want later on.

Hooray for Bloglines!

As coincidence would have it, I came across an article that mentioned BlogLines email subscriptions service… How did I not know this before? I guess because when I started using BlogLines, I pretty much dropped all my email subscriptions because I was so enamored with RSS. Now that I’m back on the newgroup/email list wagon, I will give this one a try…

Set up a Bloglines account, then scroll down to the bottom of the navigation window and select “Create Email Subscriptions”. Bloglines will assign you an email address that kinda looks like garyfugere.13999089@bloglines.com. Why set up a Bloglines email account? Here it is in Bloglines own words:

“Bloglines free email accounts allow people to receive email newsletter subscriptions within their MyBloglines page. This helps to reduce traffic through your primary email inbox and helps to contain the spam menace. A Bloglines email account gives you a trump card when a newsletter breaks the rules of opt-in marketing. When you unsubscribe from a Bloglines email subscription, the email address disappears. You never have to worry about trying to find the unsubscribe instructions for an unwanted mailing list.”