I suggest a new standard for blogs: custom RSS feeds. As far as I know this hasn’t been implemented anywhere in the way I’ll suggest it. I know that coming from me, a more tech-curious than tech savvy guy, a new technical web standard is sort of a weird thing, but bare with me.
Here’s the idea: the most popular/professional blogs all have categories. Some of those categories appeal more to certain readers than others. But when it comes to feeds most of the time the only thing you can get is the full feed. My idea is that when you hit the “get updates through RSS”-button you’re directed to a web-page where you can select the updates on the categories you want to receive (of course the full feed is still an option) by just checking them off. After hitting a “Done”-button you’ll get a customized RSS-feed.
I came to this while visiting CHUD.com (a movie website I enjoy tremendously). They have what they call a Master RSS list where you can select the categories you want to receive updates from. But if say you want to follow the news, DVD and film reviews you have to c/p three feeds into you RSS reader. Wouldn’t it be more convenient to check of the categories you want in a sort of web form and have the feed created for you?
I think this sort of customization can come in real handy for readers, plus it makes it easier for content creators to serve readers with targeted ads per category. Here’s hoping that this can be turned into a standard. And if this really is a revolutionary, never before thought-up idea, any company interested (I’m looking at you Feedburner) will be happy to learn that my idea-fees are very reasonable! Because remember: you read it here first…or..I think/hope you did.
One of the ways I keep up on things that interest me is a daily read of my RSS-feeds (another is keeping up with the people I follow on Twitter). After discovering RSS feeds I pretty much subscribed to every blog I came upon that took my fancy. Having done that for a couple of years lead to having 200-plus feeds in my Google reader about 6 months ago which in turn lead to having to sift through hundreds of posts a day. I realized I had to put a stop to that because a) it took up way too much of my time and b) not all the information I got was valuable.
So I set myself to a limit of a total of 75 feeds.
In order to get there I didn’t want to weed out just the excess feeds all at once, but take a look at every feed and see how much value it provided me. The first hundred or so weren’t that difficult: those were the ones that were always late with news I got from other blogs or blogs that were virtual identical to others. But going down from say 120 to 75 proved to be more of a challenge. One of the last to go for instance was Engadget, a site I have been following for pretty much as long as I know there are blogs out there. Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with Engadget which is by far the best gadget blog out there. But I’m not interested in every trinket that comes out any longer but more on the big stuff (say the Nexus One or Apple iPad of late). Those are also covered by sites like Mashable and Techcrunch, who also provide news on social media and web related business, something that isn’t covered (much) by Engadget. So Engadget had to go.
That did feel a bit like saying goodbye to an old friend though.
But all in all I’m just happy I reached my goal. There are probably still some feeds that could go, but for now I’ll just keep it the way it is. What this exercise has taught me though is being more picky when it comes to subscribing or keeping feeds. That’s a good thing because I don’t want to waste my time on things that don’t hold any value to me.
It’s been more than a year since changing this blog to its own hosting form and I thought it was time for a new look. So last weekend I changed to a new theme and have been doing some small tweaks during the week. The change in looks also entails some small changes about how I approach this blog.
Although I like the former minimalist look it had, I decided I wanted a bit more without going overboard. So I took some inspiration from around the web and created the new design. Being no designer whatsoever I’ll be the first to admit it’s not flawless, but I think it looks pretty decent overall. The design is a tweak of the K2 theme which is highly flexible and customizable. Being more tech curious than tech savvy it’s great to have someone to turn to with coding questions and luckily I have a great friend who’s been kind enough to let me muck about on his own server with the designing and coding and has been a true help. So Graham, once again, thank you very much for all your help and advice.
Now what about the changes. As of last weekend the lifestream has now been moved to its own page and will not be displayed as singular posts anymore. However it’s still displayed prominently on the front page in a widget which you can find on the right. Furthermore I’m still going to post at least once a week but I’m looking at ways of expanding that tally. I keep saying that I want to be a better writer, so it’s time that I do some actual writing.
I hope you enjoy the changes.
