Pruning Your RSS Bush

Roses In gardening, those who excel at growing and caring for roses will place high importance on pruning your rose bush, allowing light to reach the inside branches of the plant. Proper pruning allows for the plant to blossom to full potential.

If you’re just getting started reading RSS feeds, you may eventually find yourself with so many feeds – you may want to throw the whole thing away. Hold the phone, my gardening friend. Get your sheers out and let’s prune some of those feeds.

  • Recent Reading Habits: If you haven’t read an item from a feed in a couple weeks, might be a good signal that it has become dead wood. Prune it.
  • Too Many Items: If you can’t keep up with all the items (does this feed post 10 items every day?) you may be suffering from overeating. Too much fertilizer is rarely a good thing.
  • Dead Feed: Sometimes, you’ll need to pull a feed out of subscription because it’s never updated. Take it out of rotation and the task of feed reading won’t seem so heavy.
  • Signal vs. Noise: Is the feed providing your valuable, relevant or unique content? If not you’re going to end up skipping it soon – so just cut it.

By pruning your RSS feeds, you’ll be allowing light into the inside branches of your brain. Proper pruning allows for your feed reading to blossom to full potential.

Photo on Flickr by Memnot

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  • http://davidfinch.typepad.com David Finch

    Just “pruned” my RSS feeds a few days ago. The first time you do you have this you feel like your going to miss something. However, after a few times it gets easier and easier.

  • http://getanewbrowser.com TJ Mapes

    Signal Vs. Noise is also another good blog by 37 signals :)

  • http://bestofbrett.com Brett Evans

    I like the analogy, I always find my rss feed reader to much to handle at times so I put it off for later.

  • http://www.ladylike4.com Jennifer

    Great suggestions. I have unsubscribed to all that don’t post full post feeds in addition to your suggestions. I just don’t have time for all that clicking as menial as it seems, so they are gone.

  • http://worksona.wordpress.com holly

    I heard that keeping your feeds below Dunbar’s magical number of 150 is a good thing ;)

  • http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/ Mack Collier

    I’m actually doing this today for both my RSS feeds and bookmarks. Adding some, deleting others. Of course Converstations always makes the cut ;)

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