Paring Down

In the meantime, and since my addled state is great for performing boring, repetitive tasks, I've decided to prune my RSS feed list again. It was creeping up to 200 again, but a quick and ruthless weeding brought it down... to 70.

I started by cutting out high-volume or non-essential stuff like:

  • Planet Gnome (cool, but not essential),
  • Afterslash (fun, but not that informative),
  • TUAW (less and less informative by the day, and one I had dropped earlier but re-added before ),
  • OSNews (too many "exclusive" articles I can find someplace else),
  • WNN (great, but the municipal Wi-Fi wars in the US aren't that interesting compared to having HSDPA now),
  • BoingBoing (entirely too distracting, even if I instructed to only fetch it at night and on weekends), etc.

Then came the personal blog feeds. For instance, Simon's feed has been rolled in to Planet , so I dropped his direct feed. Same for a few individual feeds from the Planet Tao folk. All those loose ends had to go - from now on, "planets" are going to be my main source of reading material.

Who did I keep? Well, Michael, for starters, plus the quintessential John, the ever-enlightening Bruce, the ever-amazing Jamie (watch, ladies and gentlemen, as he refactors XScreenSaver time and again), all of the photoblogs I have ever subscribed to, and a bunch of feeds (yes, an infinite number of monkeys can tag the web in meaningful and profound ways).

Add a few Destakes and BBC feeds that I read in lieu of a morning paper, and that's about it.

Oddly enough, Thurrott is still in (I get him via as a 3-day digest, so it's a nice counterpoint to the hype), and I can't seem to shake off my custom Cringely feed (thanks to 's flexibility, I have a script download and reformat the full page contents instead of the miserly feed PBS provides).

I will be hammering out a suitable scraper to get a decent feed out of Infinite Loop, adding a couple more individual blog feeds, etc., but I'm going to try to keep it below 80, at least until I re-visit doing Bayesian filtering of some sort.

If you're curious about Bayesian classification, click around, I've a number of times.

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