I thought of 5 more RSS tips after I wrote the first post and thought I’d write these down as well.
Here they are:
- Get a Team. One of the coolest things that I’ve got going for me is a team of people submitting content that they find that they know are applicable to this blog and it’s contents. Get a team to manage your RSS feeds and you’ll have better coverage.
- Use RSS for Twitter (and others social services). There are a lot of people that share great links through their Twitter. I simply subscribe to their Twitter feed via RSS in my Google Reader. This way I don’t clog my twitter stream but still get a good archive of their tweets and links.
- Create personal aggregators. I do this a lot. Sometimes I simply combine a number of feeds from blogs that don’t post often but that post awesome. This way I have one feed to manage but that pulls from multiple sources. I use Yahoo Pipes for this, but there are a bunch of other great services out there.
- Admit that you’re not God. I once tried to be the God of RSS. That’s stupid. Please don’t try this. I thought that I could subscribe to 1,000 feeds and actually stay updated. Nice try. Cut back and chill out.
- Don’t be afraid of pushing the “Mark All as Read” button. There are times when you just get behind. Who cares. Really. You haven’t “missed out” on anything and you’re life is probably better for it. Get over it. Hit that button and spare yourself the mental anguish that you put yourself through. Then go clean out your RSS list and trim it.
What else you got?
[Image from OneEighteen]
wvpv says
Yahoo Pipes. Word.
@iambendavis says
I love that part about hitting the Mark All As Read button. Been doing that for a while now. Thanks for the good post.
jaledwith says
The idea of having a team of people streaming content useful for a specific Internet project is very intriguing. I'll have to give that some more thought.
Jim says
the mark all as read button is a keen one for me…i use it often
Kyle Reed says
I use to be the same way. Subscribe to as much as possible so that I do not miss anything. I got so overwhelmed I had to start over. Good advice on point 4 and 5.
I think I am slowly moving away from RSS reader and moving toward twitter doing the work for me. So many people already link to their blog as well as retweet other stuff they like why not let them help you out.
Tom says
How accurate do you find your FeedBurner statistics to be? Over the past year and a half or so, I've noticed that the number of subscribers I have tends to fluctuate by a fair percentage.
For example, some days I'll have N subscribers. The next day, I'll have about 10% less. The day after that, I'm back up to N subscribers.
I know FeedBurner is notorious for this behavior, but do you normally err on the side of N or of the 10% less?
human3rror says
I use it as a general guideline but have other metrics to provide “triangulation”.
It's more for visitors actually than myself personally.
Peter Lamb says
I have used twitter extensively and built my "followers" up. However, I still find it to be amazingly "juvenile" and sophomoric. Far too much wasted info on there. Hope it matures soon.