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You know when you are on holiday, and you come back, and you say “Catch up!”, you spend about a day telling tales (after the response from Monday’s post, a small round up of what I’ve been doing will be up on Friday), swapping stories, getting abreast (teehee) of the news? Well, it has to be done with RSS feeds. So imagine my dismay when I saw this when I returned.
Or do I have to catch up? You see, what purpose would it make if I caught up? Would I gain anything? Or would it be more worthwhile wiping the slate clean and starting afresh. What do you think?
Why I Should Catch Up
- The main reason for catching up would be that I would catch up on awesome posts, tips that I can use, or cool new things that have occurred. For example, a quick check of my “must read” bloggers (i.e. physically visited the site, rather than read them in RSS), meant I saw Jem’s ace redesign.
- The other reason is that if I comment on old posts, it’s more likely to stand out. Especially if you use something like G-Mail, that threads e-mails. I often miss comments on posts because Gmail bunches up new individual comments together, if something new (or in this case, old) appears, then it’s more likely to stand out.
Why I Shouldn’t Catch Up
- I will know what I’ve missed. Sometimes – especially with time dependant posts. For example Problogger had a $54,000 giveaway, but I completely missed the entries for it. I was like “awww, I wouldn’t of mind entering that. Sure, I wouldn’t of sacrificed the greatest holiday ever™, but it would’ve been nice to enter it.
- I can’t be arsed. Seriously. I love you guys and I love your blogs, but the thought of wading through countless posts to find one brilliant one is scary.
What Should I Do?
What should I do? Should I wade through the lot, simply press “Mark All As Read” and start again, or read the blogs that’ve interested me, and delete the rest? Incidentally, the last has got me down to 750 blogs left to read, but don’t really want to continue on it. What would you do?
Why Don’t You Help Me!
Of course, another way for me to read the best is to suggest a post written recently which you like. Could be your own, could be somebody elses. Just if you like it, please let me know. If I get enough interest I’ll do a post linking to all of them. Had a busy week this week (all will be revealed, or you can just read my Twitter).
Comments: 9 Comments
Rhys Wynne, the author of this blog, is a 20 something web designer from Colwyn Bay. 
Holy shit!!
I get worried when my notifier has 50+ next to it.
Not worth reading them all, usually anything of importance is often followed up in a later post with a link back to it.
I say mark all as read and just visit the blogs you actually want to read… oh and unsubscribe from some blogs… how do you find time to doing anything else.
Quick scan + mark all as read usually does the job…..
Life’s too short for the alternative
I always face such problem during the holidays but mine doesnt exceed 1000 . The best thing for you would be to quickly browse through some of the blogs which you like and if the post title interests you , read it .
I keep a low information diet. Most of the feeds I subscribe to contain maybe 2 out of 10 posts I’m actually interested in reading. The rest is noise. I think the key to success is how quickly you can evaluate signal vs. noise.
Mark all as read. If you missed something important, you will most likely to hear about it again soon!
Haha thats awesome I have never seen a reader or email for that matter be that high. You must have a ton of blogs in your reader to have that many posts to read.
I ran into this problem all the time. I’d start going through what interests me, then realize I’m going to be sitting there forever and eventually I’d end up deleting everything and starting over.
I try to keep a limited amount of feeds nowadays.
Personally, I’d read through as many of the posts as possible. I’d start with the blogs that I was most interested in or that had consistently very good posts. Once I’d caught up with the blogs I care the most about, I’d try to read some of the others, but it’s likely I’d just scan through the titles and pick out the ones that looked interesting.