When Harry Potter 7 came out last week, I “tuned out” of any main stream media source, including the web, until I finished the book. I was convinced someone, somewhere, somehow was going to spoil it for me and I didn’t want that. (I heard about people cracking open the book, reading the last chapter in line at midnight… I *would have killed them* with a forbidden curse or a level 12 broadsword if they uttered anything outloud. That’s another reason I avoided the midnight releases.) With travel that weekend, me having to finish the re-read of HP6, and the fact I don’t read 9 pages per minute (ie: I slowed down and enjoyed it,) it took me until Thursday to poke back into mainstream. I’ll do a review of HP7 in six months or so when the protective bubble of a new release is gone.
Anyway, part of that mainstream hiatus was really nice. When I went home, the TV didn’t come on (although I did allow myself to watch TiVo’d shows from before the release or Netflix’d content.) I didn’t check the web or my feeds — which probably made me even more productive at work, but to that end, I didn’t read the work related feeds either. Exposure-wise, it was like a vacation during normal life. Evening-wise, it felt a lot like grad school — go home, eat, get comfortable, and read all night; except that I didn’t doze off or have to re-read sections to understand them and place them in context.
When I finally plugged back in, I was swamped. My Bloglines almost always hovers at a couple of thousand posts unread/new, but this time it was worse. Normally, I can tell the feeds I read normally by their low post count, but either through Bloglines bugs (which I’m not un-convinced there’s a problem somewhere with old posts showing up when they shouldn’t,) or prolific postings in the last week, everything was jumbling together. Deciding what to read was too much work, so something had to be done. I spent an hour or so and did some cleanup, and now things are getting better.
In a nutshell, here’s what I did:
* Put every blog/feed I monitor into a group, even if it’s the only thing in that group. This allowed me to collocate blogs that surround a particular place or theme (”Sports” and “St. Louis” are two of my folders.) Sometimes this was hard — determining the “aboutness” of a blog enough to classify it, but I have two semesters of cataloging classes under my belt. Now individual feeds weren’t getting hidden inbetween the folders, and I could logically approach those blogs depending on what I wanted to read about at the time.
* My blogs and folders turned into a mismatched heap of A-Z sorted and randomly placed lists. I made everything, the folders and their contents, A-Z sorted. At least now there’s a logical, understandable reason for why blogs are in particular order.
* A while ago, I added a “Pending” folder where new blogs got dropped. That’s grown pretty big, and I found out I’ve actually started reading blogs in it but hadn’t filed them appropriately (GTD’rs will recognize that as using your inbox as a project folder. Ick.) So I’ve been working on moving the blogs to their appropriate folders. I also made a “Pending_out” folder where I’ve been moving the blogs I subscribed to but don’t read. Once the cleanup is over, I’ll scan that again, and if I really decide I’m done with them, I’ll unsubscribe. These are actually named ZZZ_Pending and ZZZ_Wayout so they show up at the bottom. I use that same trick in my cell phone with numbers I need to have but don’t want to see in the list.
* I sorted the personal blogs I follow into three different folders, depending on my relationship to you. If I know you/you know me and we’ve talked or seen each other face to face, you’re in the first group. People I know but never met (or are similar to me but not close,) I put in the second group. I reserved a folder for people who think differently from me, but it’s empty right now. I considered putting Slashdot and BoingBoing in there, but right now they’re still down in “Technology”. Since I’ve been reading the Enderverse, ([1] and
[2]I named these groups utlanning, framlings and ramen. It’s somewhat applicable, geeky and fun.
* The group that holds all of my work related feeds is called “@Work” so it’s up at the top. I can pull Bloglines open in the office, skim the first group to see if there’s anything I need to read, and be done. Because it’s not at the bottom (where Work would be,) and I don’t have to peck at it in the list, it’s easy not to get tempted. Because I file the personal blogs under “Blogs - 0 Utlanning” they’re close by too, so it’s easy to keep on top of things at the office without having to lug all the other blogs with me.
My top level folders currently are (my comments are in parenthesis):
@Work,
Astrology,
Blogs - 0 Utlannings,
Blogs - 1 Framlings,
Blogs - Librarian,
Blogs - Meta (blogging about blogging),
Buying/Deals,
Champaign-Urbana,
Comic Strips,
Favorites (I needed someplace to put Cool Tools,)
Getting Things Done,
Legal,
Me (feeds generated from sources by me, such as this blog, my flickr, etc.),
Mozilla,
Music - Dave Matthews Band,
Netflix,
Photo Albums,
Podcasts,
Services blogs (feeds about a service, such as the Flickr Blog or the Linden Blog — this is new as of this cleanup,)
Software Development,
Sports,
St. Louis,
Tablet,
Technology,
University of Illinois,
Weather,
ZZZ_Pending,
ZZZ_Wayout
* I guess I should add to this page that I use the GreaseMonkey Bloglines Hide Archived Items script so that things I’ve marked as Keep as New are hidden. I’ve been working on reviewing Keep as New posts in blogs I’m catching up on and seeing if I can’t save/file them elsewhere or just remove the Keep as New toggle.
* Today, I’m going through and marking anything with 200 posts (the max Bloglines will keep) as read, but without reading them. I’m “wiping clean” anything that I’ve let sit so long it filled up. This is a little sad, as I know I’ll never go back and read those 200 posts, but it means when new stories trickle in I might actually read them again. When I finish with the 200s, I might tackle anything over 100.
After having spent a good amount of time in Bloglines, I have this “freedback” for them.
* There are many blogs whose contents keep showing up as new, even if they’re old. I see it shows that they’re updated, but I don’t see why. It’s really annoying being thousands of posts behind in the first place — it’s really disheartening when you click on a blog and you have to re-read posts from April again. I have a feeling this is either from a bloglines bug or people adding banners/Digg It links to their feeds, and/or some changes to the feed at blogger.com that made a bunch of them show up new again.
* (I know I’ve talked about this one before.) I wish Bloglines had a “read up to here” indicator so when I load a blog with 200 posts, I could read the first 30 or so and have some way of saying “the next 170 are still new.” I think GReader does this by noticing which ones are visible on the screen before marking them as read. I would be okay with that.
* What makes the point above worse is that when you click on a folder icon or folder name, it loads all of the blogs in that folder into the reading pane. That’s great when you know there are just a few posts — but can be really dangerous when that loads 2000 posts you know you’re never going to read. What’s worse is that eensie-weensie folder icon is right next to the eensie-weensie collapse-folder minus sign. A few times I accidentally clicked the folder instead of the minus, with really horrible results. (Especially with big klunky mousing fingers and sensitive laptop mouse nobs and pads.) I’d recommend making the interface different so these functions are more isolated and that destructive (or dare-I-say idempotent ones,) like clicking a full folder, are protected somehow. (That’s one place a popup javascript alert would be acceptable.)
Now that the “virtual newspaper” in Bloglines is under control, time to attack my Sunday newspaper. (It’s already been broken down into piles: sections I’ll read, food fliers at places I shop, non-food fliers I care about, and junk I won’t read.)
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