getting through my rss backlog

i love all the feeds i follow. i keep adding more, as i click through and wander about and find new ones

sometimes i wander off and don’t check my feeds for a while. part of me feels bad about that, although i’ve been working to expand the part of me that accepts that that’s just the kind of person i am, and also figure out what that looks like in practice

feedsweeper

feedsweeper is a tool for the RSS reader feedbin. you choose some tags and how old an entry can be before it’s marked as read. i have a sweep tag set to 7 days

for me, the hard part is committing to tagging a feed for sweeping. what if i miss out? so most of the feeds that are tagged sweep are the ones i know are time-relevant and less important to me, like local news or sales notifications

frequency bins

i have a script[1] that i run every so often that checks how many entries a feed has posted in the past month, and assigns them a frequency tag. i picked 0, 1, 4, 8, 16, and 32+ as dividers, and set bins 16 and 32+ for sweeping

this is probably more dividers than needed

  • bins 4 and 8 could be combined
  • bins 16 and 32 are also basically the same but i kind of like that there’s two higher frequency feeds, because i can idly bounce between them in the same way i would idly bounce between several social media sites
  • bins 0 and 1 are also basically the same BUT 0 is a special number!! i think it’s important to check up on 0, because it can mean that the feed has died and i need to find the updated location, or that someone has decided to post elsewhere
  • i also add new feeds to 0 before running the script. this is arbitrary and works fine.

i really like this. i used to try dividing by subject, but so many personal blogs can’t really be contained like that. i’ve been surprised at how well this is working for me — i really like knowing to shift my gears up or down to match the pace of the feed, and i feel less out-of-sync as a result. for example, i’ll treat myself to reading directly on the site for slower feeds. you all put work into that and i want to enjoy the vibe!

bookmarking

if i can’t read an entry i try to mark it as read anyway and bookmark it. if i can’t get through a feed i try to remove and bookmark it

i could just delete, but the bookmarking is to assuage that swirling stomach feeling i’ve got around losing something. coming to terms with the part where i’m not ready to engage with something yet is kinda hard for me, even when it’s been sitting in there for months

i might go back to them later, or maybe i won’t, but either way i’m freeing myself of the burden

footnotes

  1. i hoped i could have it in a shareable state by the time i wrote this, but it’s been months and evidently i’ve got some sort of mental block around it. here’s to taking the leap and posting anyway ↩︎