3 Ways to save time with RSS

While you may have started tracking your favorite blogs via your favorite desktop or web RSS reader, here's three simple ways to spend less time getting more value out of your RSS feeds.

80/20 Your RSS Feeds. The 80/20 idea has been around for a while - 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers, 80% of your leads come from 20% of marketing activities, etc. The same principle works for information - 80% of the value of all the RSS feeds you've accumulated comes from about 20% of the feeds.
Reorganize your feeds into two main folders or groups: the 20% which are really worth following, the rest that you might sporadically scan. Here's what it looked like in FeedDemon.

Shortcut your bookmarkets (Firefox). There's a poorly documented trick in Firefox that will save you several steps when you come across Blog you want to subscribe to. First, you need to be using Firefox (of course) and you need to be using a RSS service like say NewsGator that offers a bookmarket - a tiny Javascript program that looks like a bookmark. In Firefox, change the Keyword in the Properties of the bookmarket to a short, easy to remember code (I use "rsn" for RSS into Newsgator).
When I get to a blog I want to subscribe to, I enter "rsn" in the Firefox Navigation Toolbar and the feed is pulled right into NewsGator where I can organize. Next time I start FeedDemon on PC, the feed is there. And you can group all your bookmarkets into a folder and move it off your Bookmarks Toolbar. Nice!

Track interests with a Google Blog Search RSS Feed. One nice feature of Google Blog Search is you can turn any search into an RSS feed. Just do the search (Limiting it to say today) , do the search, then Subscribe to your preferred RSS flavor. This is a great way of tracking ongoing interests, for example, Getting Things Done.

Comments

[Matthew Cornell]

Thanks for the tips, Bob. I'm going to try the Google search RSS hack.