Blog Information Management

Intro:
Once you start reading blogs, it’s tough to stop. They’re addicting, entertaining, and (if you pick the right ones) informative. And with the amount of time that we spend on the computer in our day-to-day lives… they’re pretty convenient, too. This is before we even begin to delve into their use as a procrastination tool. At any rate, a lot of you who read several blogs probably just bookmark the ones you like, and visit every day… or three times a day… or every hour… or however often the urge strikes you because… “Hey! I wonder if there’s anything new now!” Lots of times, there isn’t. So what just happened? You just spent a minute of your time for nothing. Sure, what’s a minute? Not much… and when you only read 2 or 3 blogs, that’s probably less than 15 minutes a day unless you’re just being ridiculous.

But what if you read 10? Or what if you don’t read more than you do now because it takes so long already and you can’t manage any more? At present, I keep up with about 50 blogs — and I’m always looking for more, not because I have no life and spend every waking minute at my computer^[#], but because there are lots of great tools out there to help you manage the information. For those of you who blog, good info management can help you keep track of things to post about. The rest of this post is going to be devoted to how I do things, with a few brief shout-outs to other options. There are lots of good ways, these are just the ones I like.

Site Feeds & NewsReaders
Back in the day, I would get a general feel for how often a site would update and would check accordingly. If a site didn’t update every day, I didn’t check it very often. It’s a good way to cut down some time: just don’t check your whole list. But this sometimes lead to missing out on things, or getting really bored when a busy site had a slow day.

Enter site syndication.

Everybody who’s anybody has a Site Feed these days. You can notice them by the little “XML”, “RSS”, or “ATOM” buttons you see tossed around. But that’s not all — lots of services (Like LiveJournal, Blurty, and Blogger) produce syndication feeds for their members, virtually all major news outlets (the NYT, AP, etc) have them, and most blog software produces these things by default, so even if it’s not explicitly linked, odds are it’s still floating around somewhere. What are these “site feeds?”

Well, they’re essentially pure-data versions of a blog. They contain vital information like title, post time, and either a brief excerpt or the whole contents of an entry. More importantly, they’re in XML (RSS and ATOM are kinds of site feeds, but are based on XML – none of this is important) which makes them very easy to be read by computer programs. So what?

Well, this is where I introduce you to a wonderful invention called the Feed Reader. Essentially what this little miracle does is keeps a list of feeds to which you are “subscribed” and checks them every so often. When one of your feeds has a new item in it, it alerts you some how. The vast majority of these feed readers look like email clients and sit on your computer. I, personally, use NewsGator because it’s web-based, so that means when I mark something as “read” at work, I don’t have to see it again when I come home. NewsGator has a pretty decent interface, and works well.

Getting in and adding your feeds is pretty easy. Once you have an account, you can generally just go to “Add Feeds” and put in the blog’s URL – FeedBurner will try to figure out where the blog’s feed is. If it can’t find it, but you somehow know where it is (via a little link or XML button, for example) you can put in a direct link to the feed as well. After that, you can organize the the feeds into folders and subfolders ’til your heart’s content. Once you get that all set up, your main screen will look something like this.

You’ll notice in that image that some of my folders are Bold and have numbers in parenthesis next to them. Those are the folders that have new items waiting to be read. At this point I can click any folder I want and a list will pop up on the right hand side with all of the new items in that folder and its subfolders. That means that, if I wanted to, I could just click on “My Feeds” and see all of the new posts on one page. Kinda like this. On the other hand, I could drill all the way down and look at the blogs one at a time. When you find a post you want to view, or if there’s a link you want to follow, just drag it into a new tab and you’re off and running.

After each post, you’ll see a line like this. The three little tiny icons: the checkbox, the floppy disk, and the envelope are the keys here. Clicking the checkbox marks the post as read. The floppy disk saves the item to the “My Clippings” folder (where it stays until you delete it) and the envelope lets you email the entry to someone. The clippings folder is about as useful as you are creative: I pretty much use it for things that I want to a) keep an eye on b) blog about, or c) save for later. Well, I used to use it for that. Now I don’t really use it, but more on that later.

You’ll be amazed how much more quickly your reading goes this way. If you get to using it, you’ll also be amazed at how quickly you stop reading blogs that don’t have syndication feeds. Also: you will probably become annoyed with sites whose feeds don’t contain the full post. But most do. One of the big draws for RSS with full posts inside is that you never have to leave your feed reader to read it. Only if you want to comment.

There are lots of other feed readers out there, depending on what you need. I’ve heard good things about FeedDemon, FeedReader is free, and Onfolio 2.0 is supposed to be amazing. Also, NewsGator’s pay edition (the web edition is free) plugs into MS Outlook.

Del.icio.us
I’ve stopped using the NewsGator “My Clippings” folder because there’s a much cooler game in town. Del.icio.us. Basically the way it works is you put a special bookmark on your toolbar, and when you see a page you want to save, you click the bookmark which pops open a window pre-filled in with all the vitals, lets you add more details if you want, and then when you submit it it disappears and leaves you to your browsing. One of the types of “details” it lets you add are “tags”. Deli.cio.us tags are a bit like “categories”… and they’re very handy. For example, my Deli.cio.us links can be found here. My links tagged “development” are here. But you can also see the “global” list… in other words, if you want to see the list of links that anyone has tagged as “javascript” for example, you can see that here. Even better: all of these various things have RSS feeds that you can plug into your newsreader. So if you want to keep an eye on, say, Google, you can just subscribe to that tag and then any time anyone posts a new link in deli.cio.us it’ll show up in your feed reader. Pretty nifty stuff.

Anyway. That’s how I keep up with stuff. This post is long enough. Questions welcome.