March 08, 2006
"Do you really read all those goddamned blogs?!"
My brother asked me that after he saw a couple hundred feeds in my blogroll. "Sure," I wrote back, "it's not as bad as it seems."
That was 200 feeds ago.
Now that I've tipped over the 400 mark, I've had to make some changes. It happened when Alec was born and I took three weeks leave from work. I decided to stay away from the computer for a while, checking email only occasionally and not opening my feedreader at all.
It felt good. Really good.
I fell back on my old habits, though, for several weeks, feeling like I was more and more behind the times, until I caught Merlin Mann's interview on Inside the Net. Listening to Merlin talk about email management, I was feeling pretty good about my inbox. I'm brutal with it. I open email just a few times a day, and clear out the inbox completely. To-do items end up in Remember The Milk, some email gets filed for reference, and an awful lot gets deleted. It feels great.
Then I opened up Feedlounge, which I was test-driving as my new web-based aggregator, and was crushed by the 3000+ unread items. Then and there I decided to simplify. I cancelled Feedlounge and resolved to stop using web-based aggregators entirely. Now I read only at home on my Mac, checking in on just a handful of core feeds every day or two. I still have the full feed list in NetNewsWire and scan through it occasionally, but feel no compunction whatsoever about marking everything read. Very liberating.
How very sad that this feels liberating. But it does.
And yes, NetNewsWire. My friend Jim suggested Vienna, which I used for a while but had to abandon because it was choking on one of my core feeds (Stephen O'Grady's). NetNewsWire does what I need, perhaps because it's very good at what it does.
