Managing feeds. The doghouse and the kennel. Like many of you, I have a love/hate relationship with my feeds. (Remind me one day to tell you about my feed: bottomless popcorn theory).

But today I'm here to tell you about two helpful strategies I use with my feeds.

The Doghouse.

Invented by a friend of mine, the Doghouse is feed probation. Basically you're marking a feed, by tag, or folder, as "in the Doghouse." You're disappointed in this feed. It's not living up to expectations. There are many reasons why a feed may get sent to the Doghouse. Maybe all of a sudden it went "partial," maybe images stopped working, maybe the past 30 items have been about a topic you're not interested in and you suspect the shift is permanent. Maybe somebody just got an iphone, and ever since it's gone downhill. You don't want these feeds to get mixed in with the good feeds, but you don't want to totally fire the feed quite yet. Send it to the Doghouse.

The Kennel.

The Kennel is just a vacation for feeds. For me, the Kennel is usually when there's nothing wrong with the feed, but I need to edit stuff down either for time or focus reasons. If you have a major project due, and can't deal with distraction, you may want to move all feeds unrelated to your project, to the Kennel.

Maybe it's the week before Macworld, and you just don't feel like reading 12 posts a day about iphone video camera rumors. Maybe you're on a budget, and reading about luxury hotels hurts right now. Maybe you have a Drupal deadline, and only want to read about Drupal and Linux for two weeks.

There are plenty of reasons to drop your feeds of at the Kennel, it doesn't mean you love them any less.

Labels: atom, doghouse, feeds, Google Reader, gtd, lifehacker, lifehacking, productivity, RSS, syndication

  ¶ 12:05 AM