How To Organize 260 Feeds in NetNewsWire

A while back I hit the 200-feed threshold in my aggregator. Whenever I find a site that might-have useful information, it gets added. Like Chris Anderson, I don’t subscribe to mainstream media directly - I get the NYTimes through Doc Searls and Dave Winer, my mainstream Minnesota-media comes through MNSpeak and Norwegianity. By that same token - I don’t subscribe to Boing Boing directly either.

At 200 feeds, I started grouping them by topics (Unread, Macintosh Programming, Podcasts, Minnesota Weblogs, Politics, etc).

This worked for a while - until:

  1. people started posting outside my designation, i.e. podcasts from people not in my ‘Podcast’ group.
  2. people in my unofficial ‘must read’ list kept getting buried by those other 225 feeds.
  3. I hit 250 feeds.

PeterMe says, Bloglines can’t handle these numbers - neither can NetNewsWire. Yes, they both can support these quantities of subscriptions (why wouldn’t they) - what they don’t support is a way of filtering, sorting, prioritizing, and categorizing that culls out interesting stuff from my ‘Everyone’ group.

Leading me to my current grouping - 7 top-level categories;

  • “Garrick’s Feeds”: For the things I publish and conversations/tags I’m tracking
  • “_Follow ups”: A NetNewsWire “Smart List” for all the posts I’ve flagged for review. This is real useful when I’m away from an internet connection.
  • “Everyone”: This is all the feeds that don’t fall into the other groups.
  • “Friends & Family”: If you know me personally and publish a feed, it’s in here.
  • “Minnesota Weblogs”: Self-Explanatory. Despite the overlap, it’s not as comprehensive as the MNSpeak Aggregator.
  • “Must Reads”: These are the feeds I skim over morning coffee that don’t fall into ‘Friends & Family’.
  • “Podcasts”: Another “Smart List” pulling together all the items with audio or video enclosures. Unlike enclosures in “Friends & Family” or “Must Reads”, these are not automatically downloaded. I use this list to sample new and interesting things.

This grouping works fairly well for my 260 feeds. I do have some thoughts on how to improve it - more on that later.