After reading Alex King’s post today about how he uses FeedLounge on a regular basis, I decided it was about time that I gave these guys another go as my regular reader of choice. Throughout their testing phase thus far, I’ve continued using NewsGator as my primary reader, simply because it was always up, and I knew how it was going to behave day after day. When I needed my news, it was there. Now that the FeedLounge guys have some kick ass servers running, it was time to make the switch.
While I was importing my OPML file from NewsGator into FeedLounge, I decided it was time to do some house cleaning. I’d somehow managed to get 108 feeds in NewsGator Online, and was experiencing some total information overload. Not to mention that I’ve realized NewsGator will apparently stop collecting new blog entries after so many unread ones pile up for a feed. For people like Scoble, this can be a problem. Just because I don’t check him one day, doesn’t mean it should randomly stop at 20 entries… He just posts that much guys! Big faux pas guys…
I decided while I was organizing my feeds, I would take some of the tips from over at 43 Folders. Sure they’re meant for organizing your email life, but since I live in my feed reader more than I do my email inbox, I figured it was time to adapt them for my use.
Namely, I created a new tag set in FeedLounge called “blogs-regular-reads”. In it you’ll find people like Scoble, the funny comic Ctrl+Alt+Del, Download Squad, Ed Bott, as well as several other people I always make sure to read on a daily basis, as soon as they publish something. Sure I’ll still skim through all the other feeds I have laying around in other tags, but not nearly as often. The “Regular Reads” group are my A-listers. If I don’t read these guys on a regular basis, I feel like I’m not wearing pants or something… Which makes it really weird reading Scoble’s blog now that I think about it…
After my organization campaign, it was time for some plain old fashioned house cleaning. I know the stats in FeedLounge are nowhere near correct (I don’t have 2,033 unread items… only 100 now), but I’d hazard to guess that I cut out about 20 blogs from my list, bringing me down to a more reasonable 80-ish feeds.
Welp guys, looks like you’ve got another full-time user on your hands. Now where are some cool new features? 
…hoping I made the 80-ish.
I’m wondering if you use multiple computers to grab your feeds. If not, is there a reason why you don’t use something like SharpReader, rather than an online aggregator?
Heh, actually you didn’t just make the 80, you made the dozen or so in my regular reads group. Don’t ask my why…
I do upon ocassion read on multiple computers, but for the most part these days, I do it all on my laptop, which runs Fedora… Hence the problem. If you think it’s hard to find a decent feed reader for Mac or Windows, try finding one for Linux that even comes close to comparing.
I also started using web-based readers when I was laptopless for a few months, because I was reading at work and then again at home, and keeping up with 20 feeds at that time was killing me.
“Not to mention that I’ve realized NewsGator will apparently stop collecting new blog entries after so many unread ones pile up for a feed.”
Actually, this isn’t the case. You always have access to all posts in a feed, but if you have “Current Posts” enabled, it will only show you the posts that are currently in the feed file. Choosing “Older Posts” will show you the past posts in the feed.
Ahhhh… So even if there are 30 posts I haven’t actually read, it will only show me the 10, 15, 20, etc. that are currently being retrieved from the actuall RSS feed… I see! Since you have the ability of manually marking items as read, this seems a tad counter-intuitive to me, but that could very well just be my personal usage style…
I also try to avoid loading older posts, because for some feeds (again, like Scoble), this can take a while as it loads some number of posts for the current page (I’m too lazy to count them), parses out the number of pages, and counts all the items in all your feeds. It’d also be nice that if, while in “Older Posts” view, it would give you some indication of total items and unread/new items for each feed (ie: “Feed (Unread / Total)”). Again, just my personal opinion…
I’m about to hit 500! Whee. Can you say information overload?
Only 8588 unread items too. What can I say…i take no notice of that anymore. I’ve found that if I do, it drives me mad trying to keep up to date. So instead I keep out of date. Its already Wednesday here and everyone posts on Tuesday there, so I’m always out of date anyway.
I so need to do a cleanup. But I manage if I keep rearranging my most important feeds up top of the tree categories in Bloglines, often it depends on what I’m interested in at the time. If only they had multi level trees my life would be a lot easier and I could prioritise better.
I have been considering going another service, maybe tag things, but I consider doing that maybe detrimental to my workflow practises and am coping okay at the moment with my keeping out of date philosophy.
If I get way behind. The oh whatever, I won’t have missed much important as it always pops up again, lemme just reset that count - philosophy works for me in restoring some sanity.