Hello RSS clarity
2024-12-16 17:09:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
Since I’m waiting for build minutes to reset, I have a few weeks without coding. I spent the past couple of days tidying up my static site generator and website feature backlog. Everything looks a bit more manageable, with duplicates and non priority items pruned. I’ve also fleshed out plans for several features, so I’ll be ready for next month.
One of items that’s been in my todo list for ages and ages now was to re-organise all the feeds in my RSS reader. I had let them get very disorganised. That happens when you add feeds over 20 years. It was at the point where I no longer openned the app at all. So this morning I decided to just get the cleanup done. I exported an OPML with all the feeds, and got stuck in, editing the XML by hand.
I opted for the simplest strategy ever. There are two groups of feeds: Bloggers and News. That’s down from about 15. Basically all individuals running their own personal websites or sites identifying themselves as blogs in their feed title are in the Bloggers group, everything else is in News. News tends to be main stream media news sites, or new media publications, but also tons of odds and ends from companies or organisations I’m interested. Even though I pruned over 50% of the feeds, there are still several hundred, but got rid of tons of cruft that had accumulated over the years.
So far it‘s looking amazing. The clarity is incredible. After just 20 minutes of reading through posts, I’ve seen Matt Mullenweg is out in Japan doing Wordpressy stuff for independant writers, there are loads of web development advent calendars since it’s December, and Jake Lazaroff has a great piece about Isomorphic Web Components aka rendering web components serverside. I’m already getting a bit of a sense of being connected again to the old blogosphere. I’m guessing it will have a positive impact on my blogging. #