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Post about feed categories

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~lucidiot 2022-10-09 18:54:28 +02:00
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<p>I made my ideas page into an RSS feed after I rewrote the page so it would be generated from a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recfiles" target="_blank">recfile</a>, so here it is. If you have made your own ideas page, feel free to <a href="https://tilde.town/~lucidiot/contact.html" target="_blank">let me know</a> and I'll feature you in the section at the bottom of <a href="https://tilde.town/~lucidiot/ideas/" target="_blank">the webpage</a>.</p>
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<title>Categorizing hundreds of feeds</title>
<pubDate>Sun, 09 Oct 2022 18:14:16 +0200</pubDate>
<guid isPermaLink="false">categories</guid>
<category domain="https://envs.net/~lucidiot/rsrsss/">Tip</category>
<description><![CDATA[
<p>I am now reaching nearly 230 feeds in my feedreader, and things are starting to get a little bit out of hand. While I can deal with the backlog of posts just fine as long as I use my feedreader every day, and am slowly working my way towards some sort of <em>Inbox Zero</em>, I was feeling like there could be much better ways to categorize my feeds so that I can process them more efficiently. I was thinking that I could put feeds into categories that would let me know how to read those feeds, with which amount of attention and which mindset.</p>
<p>For example, feeds that just have pretty images don't need much <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory" target="_blank">spoons</a> to process, while blogs with in-depths reflections on some topics will take more time to read. I can skim through some feeds while barely reading the post titles, but some other feeds have items that are actual tasks to complete. I have seen various posts about people saying you should weed out as much as you can from your feedreader because you will never read everything, but the point is not <em>always</em> to read everything.</p>
<p>When I was doing my categorizing, I had been asked on IRC about which categories I use and why, so this post is a more thought-out reply.</p>
<p>I am probably not fully done with categorizing, but I got a pretty good list right now. My current list of categories does represent how I use my feed reader pretty well, and over 90% of the feeds have a category right now. Here's a summary of those categories:</p>
<dl>
<dt>Aggregators (10 feeds)</dt>
<dd>Feeds whose items are mainly reposts from other blogs, or lists of links, etc.; those either send me down random rabbit holes that might lead to subscribing to moar feeds, or I can just skim through them. I usually do a first pass over them when I am going through all of my unread articles just to skip the posts that I want to skip, and leave the more interesting reads for later. I later come back to this category to go through the links and read everything else.</dd>
<dt>Alpine upstreams (13 feeds)</dt>
<dd>Feeds for Git tags and releases on GitHub, GitLab or Gitea instances. I maintain some Alpine packages, so I stay up to date on the new releases using those. I only mark those items as read once I have completed the relevant Alpine package's upgrade.</dd>
<dt>Comics (9 feeds)</dt>
<dd>Just webcomics; images with usually funny text in it. When I just want to reduce my unread articles count quickly without much thinking, I can go through these.</dd>
<dt>dozens (19 feeds)</dt>
<dd>An entire category dedicated to the feeds of just one person. ~dozens has blessed me with the highest amount of feeds from one author. Most of the feeds are from various of his accounts, like on Goodreads, Gitea, archive.org, etc., and I can usually skim through these, but there are multiple blogs in there.</dd>
<dt>EU Bookshop (4 feeds)</dt>
<dd>I had mentioned before that the Publications Office of the European Union has an online store that provides RSS feeds of search results. There are a few keywords I monitor, such as USB in case they ever decide to release free USB keys again, so I keep them here.</dd>
<dt>Friends (25 feeds)</dt>
<dd>All the feeds from friends other than ~dozens. Quite the hodgepodge of feeds from various online accounts and of blogs that take longer to read.</dd>
<dt>Images (6 feeds)</dt>
<dd>Feeds with just some pretty images, and sometimes some interesting facts about those images. Very quick to read through.</dd>
<dt>ITSB (44 feeds)</dt>
<dd>A subset of the many feeds I generate in my <a href="https://tilde.town/~lucidiot/itsb/" target="_blank">ITSB</a> project. I like to sometimes read the accident reports I get there, but most of the subscriptions are just so I can check that the feeds appear to be behaving normally and detect errors, so I can just mark the entire category as read if I am not in the mood.</dd>
<dt>lucidiot (15 feeds)</dt>
<dd>My own feeds, some generated by my own scripts, and some from my online accounts. Just like ITSB, this lets me troubleshoot them, or at least be aware of what I am sending out to the rest of the world.</dd>
<dt>Podcasts (3 feeds)</dt>
<dd>I'm not too much of a fan of podcasts, but some friends have started them, so I keep there separately. They usually require me to have a long chunk of free time available, because I am simply unable to listen to English podcasts while doing anything else, unless I decide to just not try to understand what is being said.</dd>
<dt>Services (7 feeds)</dt>
<dd>Status pages or blogs of various services I use, such as <a href="https://escargot.chat" target="_blank">Escargot</a> or OpenStreetMap. I quickly read through them just to stay updated on those services and know about any action I might need to take.</dd>
<dt>Tech blogs (27 feeds)</dt>
<dd>Various blogs related to programming, electronics, networking, server administration, etc. Categorizing made me realize that I think I just have too many of those, and often don't care that much about the topics in those blogs, mainly because I care less and less about the state of modern web development. Each time I go through those, I take some time to think about whether or not I want to keep the feeds in here.</dd>
<dt>Weeds (6 feeds)</dt>
<dd>Short for <em>web feeds</em>, a bunch of feeds made by my friends and providing RSS-only content. Those are much less formal than blogs, post irregularly, and encourage conversations between us since we all subscribe to each other.</dd>
<dt>Writing (8 feeds)</dt>
<dd>Anything that could possibly relate to writing, mostly in a notebook, or that invites me to write in my notebooks for any reason. This includes blogs about bullet journaling, handwriting, productivity, personal development, etc., and I would like to have more of those in my reader.</dd>
<dt>YouTube (17 feeds)</dt>
<dd>All my YouTube subscriptions. This works a lot better than actually subscribing to a channel on YouTube since you don't have to care about <em>the bell</em>; you will get notified of each video every time. This also means I don't need a Google account for this. I usually go through this category during lunch break when I work from home.</dd>
<dt>Uncategorized (15 feeds)</dt>
<dd>Those are blogs that just do not fit anywhere else. Maybe they go on about completely random topics each time, or they would just be the only feed in their category (for example, I could have <em>Transportation</em> and <em>Space</em> with one feed each), or they live at the intersection of two or more categories and I haven't decided where to put them yet. Alternatively, I might just be wondering whether I should still be subscribing to them, so I don't even bother to categorize them.</dd>
</dl>
<p>Some of those categories explain why I am not yet sharing an OPML export of the feeds I currently subscribe to; some feeds have a private token embedded in the URL for authentication, or some are not meant to be shared too publicly. Managing a custom OPML export from TinyTinyRSS would be a bit too much work whenever I subscribe or unsubscribe from a feed. Instead, you'll just get <a href="opml/feeds.opml">the feeds featured in RSRSSS</a> as an OPML file, as I slowly work my way through my subscriptions or other feeds that I find interesting and share them on here.</p>
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