Why I Ditched Most of My Feeds, and Changed to NetNewsWire

Just part of my old feed list. What was I thinking?

I was just overwhelmed. My "system" felt organized at first, but it got to be chaos. So this weekend I made some radical changes in how I use feeds.

For a long time, I'd kept over 400 feeds organized into about 20 topic areas (environment, energy, science, women, law, etc.) bundled into my former favorite feed reader, Sage (a Firefox plugin). I figured since they were bundled neatly into folders and alphabetized within, I could find what I wanted easily.

But gradually I realized that I almost never looked at most of the feeds my topic folders. The only ones I scanned regularly were task-related -- mostly search feeds based on specific topics I'm currently following, and I change these a lot.

Bearing that in mind, this weekend I ditched all  my general topic folders from my feed list -- about 80% of my subscriptions. But now, since my feeds are more focused on exceedingly timely and personally relevant sources, I think they'll help me participate in online conversations -- public and private.

Here's more about the changes I made...

My new feed list, in Net News Wire. Ah, much simpler! (Click to enlarge)

I've also switched to a new feed reader, NetNewsWire -- which has a far superior display and great usability and features. It's not free, but it's pretty inexpensive, and a free download trial is available. (UPDATE: BTW, Brent Simmons, creator of NNW, has a blog.)

NetNewsWire is also my new podcatcher, allowing me to dump the buggy, crash-prone, tedious-t-clean-up Juice podcatcher I had been using.

What do I mean by task-focused? Well, I sat down and considered: What do I actually DO with feeds? They're not a general resource library. For me, they're a way to follow things that are happening right now that I personally want to know about immediately. This falls into the following categories:

• Client sites/projects, or feeds from project management systems such as Basecamp, or project wikis.
• Ego surfing: Searching for new mentions of my name, or fresh links to any of my blogs.
• Friends & colleagues: A very select group, people I actually know well. A mix of personal and professional blogs.
• Current radar: Collections of specific topics I'm currently following via search feeds. I've got a few staples in here, like a folder of search feeds for "conversational media," but the rest change a lot. This sometimes includes individual sites or blogs I want to keep an eye on temporarily.
• Podcasts: All my audio and video podcast subscriptions. NetNewsWire does a good job of grabbing those enclosed media files.
• Prospects: Organizations or individuals whom I'd like to work with, so I follow what they're doing.
• Media & journalism: One of the few topic folders I did read regularly in my old feed system, so I kept it. I whittled my list way down, though.
• PR & marketing: I'm not a PR or marketing person, but there are some very sharp people in this field who are doing extremely innovative things with conversational and online media -- generally more so than in journalism, it pains me to admit. Again, I carried over this folder from my old feed list, but whittled it way down.

Since I'm using feeds in a way that's more central to my business, and more sensitive to the privacy of my friends and clients, I'll no longer be publishing my current feed list as an OPML file.

What do you think of these changes? Have your gone through a similar evolution in how you use feeds? Please comment below.

Comments

[Gray T. Miller]

The main question is: does NNW sync to your iPod? My feedlist is just starting to become more unmanageable (due to the new problogging job, and some new friends) and I would make the switch IF it doesn't add a step to syncing my iPod.

[Amy Gahran]

Gray, I don't use an iPod -- I think they're overpriced and overhyped, and I'm fundamentally opposed to anything that tries to lock me in to a particular software, service, or file format. I actually just have a 1G Memorex Mp3 player, and it works just dandy.

So I've never had the luxury of iPod Synching.

NNW will automatically copy enclosures to iTunes, if you tell it to in the settings.

- Amy

[Dave Taylor]

Not sure if NetNewsWire does it, but I am a big fan of the Smart Feeds that NewsGator Online offers. In fact, I just blogged about it (again) here:

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/keep_track_of_blogosphere_buzz.html

:-)

[Amy Gahran]

OK, on the podcatcher front...

Under NNW preferences -> downloads -> enclosures:
- Check off the boxes to automatically download the kind of enclosures you want, and also "Add to iTunes library."

Then, under NNW preferences -> downloads -> adding to iTunes:
- check "delete from downloads folder after adding."

That puts all the podcasts you grab via NNW into iTunes, so you can synch with an iPod or whatever, and also avoid leaving duplicate media files lying around elsewhere that you'd have to clean out. (That was a really tedious process in Juice, BTW).

- Amy

[Franklin Bradley]

I used NNW briefly, and I liked it, but I check my feeds from home and at work, and sometimes on my Treo, so a reader that requires me to sit at one computer doesn't do me much good. I use Bloglines now, which certainly is not as powerful as NNW or most of the other downloaded software, but it meets my needs.

Yes, I know that NNW can sync with Bloglines, but it just pulls everything in and marks everything as read, rather than only flagging those items that I've viewed as read in Bloglines after I have actually read them in NNW.

I tried NNW a little while ago, so perhaps they've added this function since then. If they have, I'd certainly try it again.

[Amy Gahran]

Hi Franklin

I know NNW does synch to Newsgator online, a free Web-based feed reader. don't know about Bloglines.

- Amy

[Koan Bremner]

I've been using NNW for over a year now, and, with two caveats, I think it's a rock-solid piece of software. To answer two points raised above, it integrates seamlessly with iTunes / iPod for podcatching... NNW *does* offer the Smart Folders feature (as of the latest release)... but now, the concerns.

1) I've found the performance has dropped alarmingly over the last year. Maybe it's because I tend to keep the full text of posts - if I didn't, maybe the problem wouldn't arise. As it is, it can sometimes take up to a minute to navigate from one post to the next unread post, using the space bar.

2) The Smart Folders functionality (which rocks) seems to come at a price, in terms of an extra delay after refreshing the feeds. This is while the contents of the new posts are compared to the criteria of the Smart Folders. The overhead seems to be substantial.

Also, it's not a rare occurrence for NNW to crash during a refresh. It doesn't lose any data, but it does mean the feeds have to be checked again on restart. And as for integration with NewsGator Online, I have never got it to work as published. On syncing for the first time, NGO never imports all of the feeds I have set up on NNW - and the read status of posts in those feeds which *are* set up was never reliably (or consistently) synchronised between the two. A nice idea, but not yet reliable enough for my taste.

So, I love the functionality, but am concerned that either stability issues were introduced in the latest release, or stability declines beyond a certain data file size, or both.

[Dave Ferguson]

Amy:

Kudos for rethinking -- and for asking aloud, "what was I thinking?" I'd see your 400-feeds figure before, and thought "two minutes per feed per week = over 13 hours. Holy broadband!"

Not that you spent that kind of time, but I know my own distractability. It's the same reason I won't own more than one four-drawer file cabinet: when it's 90% full, it's time to cull.

I also think your new classification system seems to fit with how you say you work -- so it's a more focused functional feed list.