Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Finally! I’ve got my RSS addiction under control. First of all, I am back to a single feed reader for a while now. aKregator was a tiny bit too annoying to use together with Google Reader, so I got rid of it.

Then I started cleaning up my subscriptions. I hit it hard the first time removing almost a 100 (!!!) feeds. Then I dedicated a few minutes on an almost daily basis to cleanup things here and there. Google Reader’s “Trends” functionality was invaluable in the process.

Today I realized that I see something on my screen that I haven’t seen in a long time. There are only 3 (!!!) feeds with unread items: 6 articles from List A Part, which I tend to need a special mood to read, and two very high traffic Flickr groups - those are simply impossible to catch, as they get around 300 pictures a day each. Overall, that is my equivalent of an empty feed reader with nothing to go through.

Trends page informs me that I have 135 feeds altogether. That’s still a tiny bit too much as I’m waiting for a few feeds to expire my no-activity time limit (3 month).

Overall I have to say that I’m pretty happy with the state of affairs. Much help in achieving current situation came, unexpectedly, from email. Quite a lot of stuff which I had feeds for, can be reproduced via email, and in most of the cases, I can go through those faster than through feeds (my Inbox now has 19 unread messages and half of them don’t even need a reply).

Hooray! And a pint to that!