rss

I love Google Reader and I love reading about the latest in technology, politics, you-name-it, but I have a ridiculous number of feeds and they are just too much of a time sink. I need some way to clean them out so I can have more time to do other more important things.

One idea is to borrow from a technique that I have used to get rid of new clothes: go into your closet hang all the hooks backwards. Whenever you wear a garmet hang it back up in the closet in the usual way. n months later, take the garmets that are still hung backwards and donate them to the local thrift store. I can't remember where I got this idea from, but I think it might have been from lifehacker.com (whose feed I am subscribed to).

For feeds, I was thinking maybe I could create a new label called "keeper". Whenever I read a item from a feed that feel I could not have lived without reading it, that feed gets labelled with the "keeper" label. n months later, I can toss out all the feeds that do not have the "keeper" label.

Alternatives to using feeds:

• Go to the website for the feed and look at the most popular articles in the past week or month. This isn't always possible with all feeds.
• When you need to know how to do something, just google it, rather than subscribing to a feed of how-tos (like lifehacker.com for instance). Pull rather than push.
• Go to a site like reddit.com or digg.com when you have some free time, otherwise, don't worry about all the stuff you might have missed.

A while back I created a recently updated drupal modules feed. I used RSSxL. This sucked wind because it would only scan the first 20kB of the page it was scrapping so it would miss tons of drupal module updates. I recently tried Dapper and was really impressed. It could take any webpage and allow me to click on divs and construct an RRS feed. It wasn't flexible enough though and was difficult to use. Part of the difficulty was probably because Dapper is a web app.

I recently discovered OpenKapow and they took a different approach, making a desktop Java application instead. It is hugely flexible and easy to use. I got a feed up and running much quicker than I did with Dapper. Here it is: Drupal Recently Updated Modules Feed. Since OpenKapow is so powerful I think it will be possible to add the entire description of the module (for modules with more than one paragraph) along with the links to the updated versions and what not.

I found a secret Digg feed today. I have been looking for a while for a way to get a feed for the "Top Today" page because the regular digg feed has too many articles. It turns out it does exist although it doesn't seem to be advertised anywhere on digg's site. Here is is: http://digg.com/rss/toplinks.xml.