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.

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.”

This tip is for somewhat advanced users (and people who are trying to cut down on the amount of time they spend going through their RSS feeds). That’s just a warning, but don’t let it discourage you from reading on…

There are three types of subscription services you can utilize at del.icio.us (for me at least).

The first is what I’ll call “category” subscriptions. This is where you subscribe to something like http://del.icio.us/tag/productivity. This will give you all the web sites/pages that people bookmark and tag with productivity. That’s one that I subscribe to (cause I’m sure you hadn’t already figured that out).

The second type is “user” subscriptions. This is something along the lines of: http://del.icio.us/tag/devilishgrin. (These are real examples, people) I tend to think of this as slightly more “drilled down” than the category subscriptions since I keep an eye out for when users bookmark a lot of pages in a category to which I subscribe. From there, I’ll check out their page (like mine: http://del.icio.us/nelsoc. I used to use http://del.icio.us/new/nelsoc, but they’ve taken that away from me… Bring back the tag clouds!)

The third (and obviously final) type is “user category” subscriptions. This is what I try to use the most since it limits the amount of “crap” you have to sort through. Once again, learn by example: http://del.icio.us/tag/worldbfree/basketball. In case you are in need of an explanation: here I’ve noticed worldbfree posting things that interested me, so I subscribed to his feed. However, his interests, while as diverse as mine, do not exactly reflect mine (which is probably a good thing). So, instead of looking at all the things he chooses to bookmark, I’ve taken (in this example) only the things he categorizes as basketball sites/pages. Now, I don’t go around subscribing to just anyone’s del.icio.us feeds, so worldbfree should feel very special indeed. Of course, I’m the only one on BlogLines who’s actually subscribed to his feeds… but then, I’m the only one on BlogLines who’s subscribed to my feeds… and I don’t know where I’m going with this…

To recap:

First: Subscribe to categories
Second: Find users within the categories
Third: Find categories within the users within the categories

I wouldn’t recommend expanding the other way too often. The point for me is to cut back on the amount of time I spend in my feed reader, so adding users and/or categories is something I do very judiciously.

wingedpig.com - Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines: Google Launches My Google, World Does Not End

My Yahoogle doesn’t track what information you’ve already read, and what bits are new. So, each time you visit your My Yahoogle page, it takes time to scan the page to see if there’s new information. This is a complete waste. If you only show new things, the amount of information that needs to be displayed decreases greatly. There’s less information, and it’s all new. It’s a much more efficient way of dealing with many information sources.

Another flaw in the My Yahoogle model is the idea of placing everything on one page. Besides forcing the user to become a web page designer (should I place this information source in the right corner, or left?), this again reduces the number of information sources that can be followed, to a number that can be reasonably placed on a single web page.

The Bloglines user interface was developed partially in response to these flaws. Only show new articles. Provide a mechanism (the tree display in the left pane) that allows you to easily select a subset of information sources to display at any one time.

I have over 200 subscriptions in my Bloglines account (many of which you can see in my blogroll on the left). There’s no way I could follow that many sites in My Yahoogle.

Now, granted Mark Fletcher is probably more than a little biased, but in this case, I agree with him.

I also have slightly over 200 subscriptions (after cutting it down from 311) in my BlogLines account. I tried using My Yahoo for a while (since I’d been using it for weather, email, calendar, fantasy basketball) to read RSS feeds, but once you get past about 10-15 feeds, it becomes unmanageable. Even if you separate out categories onto different pages.

I use Gmail, so I thought that maybe My Google would be good for that, but I already have the Gmail plugin for Firefox, so really it doesn’t help that much… not to mention that AirSet has a new version of their web app available (since yesterday). Airset is my new (one and only) homepage. (I used to have Bloglines and Gmail as other home pages - since you can have multiple home pages in Firefox), but that was WAY too distracting from actually Getting Things Done.

I use Firefox (which I shouldn’t even have to recommend to you) … and I have an extension called Adblock. I think Firefox has an ad blocking featuring (or more simply, and image blocking feature) built in (cause it rocks). However, Adblock allows you to block not only images, but Flash movies (cause I don’t really want to shoot Brad Pitt, or punch a monkey, or even look at any stupid moving ads). It takes time to block the images and Flash animations, but with liberal use of the “*” you can make short work of most advertising servers. Often you can even make it so you still see ads you want to see. So, that’s my first tip…

The second tip is, well, not so much a tip… but a behavioral observation. I am more than happy to look at ads in people’s RSS feeds. As long as the ads don’t flash at me or move around, I really could care less. I consider that a great way to support the people I enjoy reading. In my recent reading there has been quite some fervor over whether people should put full text entries in their RSS feeds, or whether they should stick to summaries. I am a full-on proponent of full text. I have been known to unsubscribe from feeds that only have summaries (not all of them, like Scoble, but some). Really, there are 2 reasons that make sense as to why a publisher would only have summary feeds. 1) Advertising revenue, and 2) getting people to look at other posts on the site (in attempt to make more advertising revenue) Frankly, I’d rather have ads in my RSS feeds than partial posts or summaries. I put that in bold so hopefully someone will notice. Not likely, but a man can dream (in fact, a man must dream, according to Brian Tracy)

Of course, the issue of “full posts with ads vs. summary posts with no ads” pales in comparison to ads as posts. Partial or summary posts don’t make me anywhere near as mad as feeds that mislead my BlogLines account into telling me there are new posts when, in fact, there is merely an advertisement waiting for me. I was excited to subscribe to Computer World’s RSS feeds until after about 2 weeks I’d consistently seen more posts starting with “Partner:” than actual posts with content. It goes without saying.

Everybody’s writing a novel + Dave Ramsey + Give Me The Rock + Affirmations anyone?

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.

Tips for Gamers + TiddlyWiki Tutorial + GTDTiddlyWiki w/ Calendar +

Fred On Something…

The problem is that to use the Gmail Atom service in Bloglines, you need to build your feed’s URL like this: https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom, to provide the user and password to the feed’s server.

All the problem is there: you have the username and the password in plaintext directly in the URL.

This is something I thought I should carry as it is important information. I tried to use the Atom feed for my Gmail account once, but didn’t have it right, so it never worked. Good thing, I guess. Of course, I realized that reading my Gmail via an RSS feed is not really that helpful anyway. I use the GTDMail method with my account, so it’s nice to be able to see more than just the new messages when I go there. It also means I use my inbox as a to-do list, but I’m working on ways around that (using the Stars is a good example).

Time to work on some categories for the blog now, I think…