By Britt Parrott

It’s all too easy to let your newsreader quickly fill with feeds from sites you find interesting, only to realize weeks later than you don’t have the time nor the interest to scan half of them. It only takes a couple days of being offline for thousands of unread posts to tell you that something is not working.

It’s important to devise a method to make sure you get the most out of your feeds, and make sure your feeds don’t drive you crazy.

h3. Weed your feeds

First, treat your newsreader as the place where only the best stuff lives. It’s your personal Ivy League school of information, so make sure that any feed that makes its way into your reader is qualified to be there.

Next, when you come across an interesting post at a new site, determine if it is a one-time resource or if the post is part of a site that you want to explore further. If it’s a one-time resource, tag it in del.icio.us and move on.

Then, rather than instantly subscribing to that new site based on one interesting post, keep it open in a tab in Firefox instead. Don’t be afraid to have up to a dozen or two tabs open at all times. Use the SessionSaver extension to remember your open tabs if you have to close Firefox (Saft for
Safari also does this). When you reopen Firefox, all your open tabs will reappear, allowing you to get back to work right where you left off.

Each day, browse through your open tabs to see what sites have content that still appeals to you. While it might seem like a waste of time to browse the actual site instead of the feed, you will get a better feel for the site. It’s similar to meeting someone and later chatting with them over IM. You have a better feel for who they are without actually being in front of them.

If a site fails to keep your interest over a few days, consider closing the tab and letting it go. If you’re not ready to let it go, keep the tab open a bit
longer or bookmark it in a folder labeled something like “Feeds to Ponder.” It’s too easy to add feeds to your newsreader and let the information get out of control. If you put the work into pre-qualifying feeds, you won’t be wasting as much time sifting through them, and you won’t feel that pit of despair when you let them collect over a few days of being away from the computer.

Once a week, take a look at the tabs that have been open for a while. Compare their content to similar sites that you already subscribe to. If they’re not adding information or making you see things in a different light, close the tab. If another good post comes along on that site, it will most likely show up in one of your existing feeds anyway.

RSS and newsreaders are only as good at managing information as the person who is doing the subscribing. As it becomes easier to subscribe, don’t let the quantity of feeds overrule the quality.

Author Bio: Britt Parrott is the communications manager for an engineering firm in Portland, Oregon, by day and a screenwriter by night. He posts most of his nonsense at Perhapses.

9 Comments on Pre-qualifying RSS feeds with Firefox and SessionSaver

  1. Michael says:

    Then, rather than instantly subscribing to that new site based on one interesting post, keep it open in a tab in Firefox instead. Don’t be afraid to have up to a dozen or two tabs open at all times. Use the SessionSaver extension to remember your open tabs if you have to close Firefox (Saft for
    Safari also does this). When you reopen Firefox, all your open tabs will reappear, allowing you to get back to work right where you left off.

    Opera has this feature free :) That is, the browser itself isn’t free. I snagged a copy on their 10th Anniversary (they gave away free serials).

    Anyway, I am loving the website Keith! Great work.

  2. Britt says:

    Thanks for the update on Opera. I missed the window of opportunity for a free license, but it’s good to know that it has that feature built in.

  3. Keith says:

    Michael – Thanks for the tip. For the record, Britt needs to take credit for this one. Many thanks for him to contributing.

  4. Lea says:

    I take a slightly different tack – keeping tabs open is too much of a system and cognitive overload.
    I load any interesting looking feed into my feedreader, but new ones go ‘down the bottom’. This lets me keep an eye on them and see if they are doing anything interesting.
    From there, they are either deleted after a few days (not very often) or moved into one of ‘read this’, ‘2nd pri’, ‘if not busy’ (which is massive, and currently has over 500 unread posts in it – in all probability I will mark them all as read) and ‘if bored’ (things like amazon feeds)
    This lets me track lots of feeds, but only let it interrupt my work flow to the extent that i have time for.
    Feeds tend to filter up and down the folder structure over time. Works for me! :)

  5. Jack says:

    I’m a lot more aggressive and disorganised. I don’t subscribe to a site unless I’ve been linked to it twice or more (hopefully it’s got enough of a distinctive look so that I remember I’ve been there before).

    I find that a whole pile of tabs is very distracting when I’m trying to do work in my browser.

  6. Britt says:

    I think of my RSS reader as an inbox, so there are rarely any unread posts (out of 55 feeds currently). I use tabs as an open filing system (similar to a tickler system).

    I have eleven categories in my RSS reader, so if I’m going to subscribe to a post, it has to fit into one of those categories. That way, I don’t allow subscriptions to pile up uncategorized.

    Browser tabs for me are never a distraction because they are in the background, although I do agree on the system overload, since I tend to have three dozen tabs open at all times. It’s surprising to me how much of my work is done in a browser now compared to several years ago.

  7. cjbrown says:

    I just add it to Bloglines then scan through them and “save” any interesting items. Later I go back and decide if they should be “clipped” for later.

    I used to do Tabs and still do occasionally, but I just add bookmarks into folders. Then I can just “Open in Tabs” when I want to catch up on that subject. Not as good for blogs, but great for loading all the virus sites to compare risk levels from many companies.

    I also use “Bookmark Syncronizer” to ftp/xml sync all my PCs and Mac. That makes a huge difference.

  8. Silvia says:

    I suggest you all who use Firefox to have a look at this extension. Scrapbook allow us to save from a word to a page and its links, and many midia files. Everything can be arranged in files and we have an easy access, just a click in the sidebar. The search is also excellent. I’ve downloaded the manual. It is the best way for me to file things for evaluation.
    http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/s.....hp?lang=en

    I haven’t come to a conclusion which is the best rss reader: Bloglines or My Yahoo’s page, where I can have till 100 feeds (not sure, I have 10)and each one with 30 entries each page. I can read all feeds for a gist. However, the subscription in Bloglines is much easier and I do something similar to Lea.

  9. Britt says:

    I like the bookmark idea for sites I’m considering subscribing to and opening them in tabs when I have the time to evaluate them.

    I had installed Scrapbook a while back. Maybe it’s time to put it to use. Thanks.

    I use Bloglines primarily because it is browser based but am wondering if some standalone readers might have better features for managing feeds.

Leave a Reply