True RSS Feed Bankrupcy

by javery on September 18, 2009

People like to refer to the act of marking all of their feeds as read as declaring RSS bankruptcy. They get to clear out all the items and start fresh. I realized recently that I needed to declare a true RSS feed bankruptcy and delete all of the RSS subscriptions I had collected over time. I had well over 300 subscriptions, many of them were to blogs that weren’t active or on topics I wasn’t particularly interested in anymore. Some of those subscriptions were from back in 2003 or earlier and were moved from Feeddemon to Bloglines to Google Reader.

I did this because I realized two things. The first is that I wasn’t keeping up with the feeds and they had simply become a burden. I used to rely on feeds to keep up with the community, but now I rely much more on twitter to do that. I also realized I was becoming interested in much different things. A large portion of my feeds were .NET related, and while I am still interested in .NET, my focus in the area has become paper thin. I care about ASP.NET MVC and changes to C#. Everything else .NET has just become noise to me.

I have also found Hacker News which I rely on more and more for news and community. It has not only become a great place for startup related news, but chances are any major Ruby, Python, Erlang, Scala, Clojure, or NoSQL announcement will find it’s way there. (and even some .NET topics).

I have realized that there are only two types of blogs I really want to subscribe to. Blogs that consistently deliver valuable technical content or business advice, or blogs of people I consider friends. I look forward slowing re-building a much leaner list of feeds and hopefully returning to getting value out of my blog reader.

-James

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