My Whole Life in Happy Little Folders, by Jeffrey Veen

My Whole Life in Happy Little Folders

I think RSS and blogs and news aggregators had finally gotten the best of me. There were literally hundreds of subscriptions haunting me each day; a bright red counter showing unread posts creeping up into the thousands. As my partner Lane puts it, "I feel like I make things un-bold for a living now." He's referring to the unending accumulation of things that need to be changed from "new" to "read" -- email, lists, blogs, comments ... even new music and the junk on our Tivos.

So I switched off the preference to show unread things in the dock. Whew. Then I pruned aggressively. I created a simple classification system for the feeds I was left with, with nothing floating around outside, mostly because I cheated with a miscellaneous category -- a digital junk drawer -- the librarian's bane.

But I don't really care. Reading blogs is only partially about staying abreast of current events, be it Fallouja or validating XHTML. Sometimes, it's just about looking for inspiration, being entertained, or simply wasting time. And that is exactly how I like to classify stuff.

Here's what the folders contain:

dont' miss Couple of news sources, feeds for where my friends are going via upcoming.org, Netflix queue, and Merlin's 5ives. Gotta get my Tivo 'Now Playing' in here.

family Feeds from Leslie, Greg, and Amy, plus their flickr photos.

friends Feeds from people I hang out with, industry and othewise.

ego Subscriptions to searches on my name and urls with services like Technorati, PubSub, and Bloglines. Also, feeds on veen.com comments and traffic statistics. I like to know what people are saying about me, don't you?

work Project feeds from Basecamp, internal wiki changes, recent documents uploaded to our intranet. Feeds from my coworkers and partners like Doug and Nadav.

tools Things I use that get updated a lot: del.icio.us, Flickr, Feedburner, Six Log, Basecamp, etc. If you make something on the Web that has an audience, you better get it together and publish a feed. Seriously.

peloton Some domestic but mostly European cycling. Racing coverage and a couple fan blogs.

music A variety mp3 blogs, my favorites: Teaching The Indie Kids to Dance Again, largehearted boy.

pix Beautiful work from Tim, Heather, Matt, and all my cameraphone-wielding friends at Flickr.

if only there was time boing boing, Engaget, TMN, stuff about content management, search engine stuff, Zeldman and scores of other CSS/XHTML/design/validate/tips-n-tricks, a bunch of del.icio.us subs, lots and lots of sundry feeds picked up along the way.

update: Yes, I realize "peloton" is spelled wrong in the screenshot. I studied Español in school, so cut me some slack.

update 2: Since you asked, here's a heavily-edited OPML file of the blogs I read. It can be imported to most every RSS aggregation software. If you view it in your browser, odds are it will be blank. Save as...

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 19 November 2004 at 9:28 AM. It was filed under Personal.

Comments

1. On 19 November 2004 at 10:03 AM Jonathan M. Hollin wrote:

I know the feeling. I had to savagely prune my unread feed collection quite recently, once the number of unread items had exceeded 1000.

I've also changed my behaviour with incoming feeds. I used to read everything I was subscribed too - these days I tend to just scan titles (so you better make them good and descriptive!), if the title doesn't appeal to me then I delete.

Who has the time to read everything that comes in?

2. On 19 November 2004 at 10:05 AM Bill Johnston wrote:

Hey Jeff -
Looks interesting, how about posting your OPML file?

3. On 19 November 2004 at 10:23 AM veen wrote:

I'll post an OPML file, but I'll need to do a bit of selective editing first. Lost of personal accounts, etc.

4. On 19 November 2004 at 10:28 AM Nick wrote:

Sweet.

5. On 19 November 2004 at 10:40 AM Chris Moritz wrote:

Just cut out 175 feeds last week; had to be merciless. I still have entirely too many, but my classification scheme helps keep it (kind of) manageable.

Thinking heavily about turning off the "red if more than 9" preference in NNW -- it mocks me when a folder is red; I just NEED to get it down to blue, which is creepy.

6. On 19 November 2004 at 12:01 PM Robert Scoble wrote:

That's one reason I'm doing my link blog. So my readers don't need to read the 957 feeds I follow. That's at:

http://www.kunal.org/scoble/

Also, on Windows, watch for Onfolio 2.0. It has a newspaper view which will make reading feeds much nicer. More to come on that when I get it.

7. On 19 November 2004 at 12:03 PM Roland Tanglao wrote:

auto-expiring and auto-deleting is your friend

In NetNewsWire auto-expire the items from the feeds you don't care about. Like Dave Winer says, it's not email. If the stuff is really important others will blog about it. And most of the time you can find it through search.

Here's how to make feeds auto expire:

1. Control click on the group or feed you want to auto-expire
2. Exapand the Persistence Triangle
3. Click on Custom Persistence Setting
4. Set it to 1 day to delete the items

You are done!

Hope that helps!
...Roland

p.s. more info at:
http://www.rolandtanglao.com/archives/2004/11/13/my_rss_overload_strategy_that_i_developed_after_the_bloggercon_iii_overload_session

8. On 19 November 2004 at 12:07 PM Gord Ross wrote:

Not to be nit-picky, but you spelled Pelaton wrong Jeff... it's peloton -- more importantly though, what's in there? I've noticed a distinct lack of RSS from the major online cycling publications that I frequent: VeloNews, CyclingNews.com, DailyPeloton.com, etc.

9. On 19 November 2004 at 12:28 PM Boris Anthony wrote:

Been meaning to post on just this topic.
What I don't get is why don't current aggregators (and mail clients for that matter) use the reams of meta data inherently available in the data-objects they deal with (in this case, RSS/Atom).

Why can't I have a view of, say, posts by author/creator, or by subject (categories), or by date? Presented in a nice list, à la Flickr tags screen (larger text size for more entries matching the tag)?

We need hybrid interfaces for the computer communication age: self managed explicit categorization/tagging, group managed explicit categorization/tagging, protocol implicit (from spec) categorization/tagging and environment filtered categorization/tagging (feeds from people in my address book should be tagged as such and given greater weight, if I so specify)...

etc...

Oops! Spilled my beans!
(Working on a mapping system for metadata management projects... will blog it soon.. ish...)

10. On 19 November 2004 at 2:57 PM -b- wrote:

you're into cycling? cool. I had no idea. Now there's an news industry that hasn't caught up with RSS, as noted above. What peloton feeds are you using?

Interesting related story on that, TDFBlog over the summer had a balloon in readership because he had RSS and summarized all the cycling news sites that didn't.

unbold is right. i don't click, cause I know that'll mean hours spent reading headlines. I have bold fear, or fear of bold.

11. On 19 November 2004 at 3:39 PM Jochem Donkers wrote:

You have special feeds in your bloglines for your work. I am wondering how you secure your feeds or all the work documents public available?

12. On 19 November 2004 at 4:20 PM veen wrote:

Yes Jochem, I have subscriptions to feeds that contain sensitive material. That's why I don't use Bloglines.

My RSS reader, NetNewsWire, allows me to selectively export or share feed-by-feed. So I just click off the whole 'work' directory. I'm sure Bloglines has this feature now, but it didn't in the past, and got me in trouble with a client when our project roadmap started showing up in public searches. Crap.

13. On 29 November 2004 at 11:43 AM Ben Saunders wrote:

Seeing as we're on a spelling/grammar tip, surely it should read 'if only there *were* time'?! ;)

And to fellow leg-shavers across the globe, I hope you're following Gregg's World - http://www.cyclinglinks.com/gregg/ - there's no RSS but it's inspirational reading nonetheless.