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Must Read, Skim, Low Priority

I reorganised 287 RSS feeds in NetNewsWire under just three folders. #RSS #NetNewsWire #OPML

Khürt Williams
Khürt Williams@islandinthenet.com
Oct 6, 20268 min read

his past weekend I reorganised my RSS feeds. My OPML file had 287 feeds spread across 16 topic folders, plus one completely empty folder.

At some point, I realised that topic folders simply did not work. They did not tell me what to read or what was important. For instance, if I have 15 photography websites in a folder, but only spend time reading two or three on a regular basis, the rest are mostly noise. You might think I should just get rid of them, but I didn’t want to do that straight away. I didn’t want to risk dropping someone who might just be less prolific than other posters.

I decided to regroup my feeds by reading mode across four obviously subjective levels:

  • Must Read: blog feeds I read in full, every time.
  • Skim: blog feeds where I scan the headlines and open only what seems interesting.
  • Low Priority: blog feeds I keep but rarely open. I read them only when I have spare time, and they are candidates for deletion.
  • Delete: feeds I no longer want, removed from my subscriptions.

Re-rating 287 feeds one by one seemed daunting, so I turned to my AI assistant, Claude. I exported my existing OPML file to my Mac so I would have a backup. I then uploaded the OPML file and asked Claude to help me work through each folder. Claude presented a list of about 20 feeds at a time from each folder. I tagged each feed by its position in the list instead of typing out the full name. So 1M, 2S, 3L, 4X meant that feed 1 was a must read, feed 2 was one to skim, feed 3 was a low priority, and feed 4 was to be deleted.

We went through every single folder like this. Along the way, I flagged some for deletion and even caught an exact duplicate (another issue with organising solely by folder).

It was tedious going through every single one. My decision criteria were loosely based on whether I regularly visit a site, read the content, and leave a thoughtful comment at the end. For photography websites, I was less interested in those whose posts were just a collection of pictures and mostly about gear, as opposed to blog posts that included photos and told a story. I want to read about the trip the person took, why they chose to take pictures of the subjects they did, or some kind of narrative.

I am drawn to blogs that sometimes force me to think about things and maybe change my perspective, not just “all happy, hunky-dory” fake Facebook-style posts. I like to read opinionated and thoughtful blog posts, even if I disagree with the opinion.

Some feeds stayed and some went. Some I realised were just photoblogging (pictures, no words), and for those I could just as easily go to Mastodon or Instagram and doomscroll all I want. Nothing wrong with microblogging. I do it myself. I prefer to post directly from WordPress to Mastodon, so the post does not show up on my main feed, which I want to keep for longer posts.

I wish that some of these photobloggers would do that. But if it is something coming through RSS, I want the photos to have a story behind them, or the story to have photos to support it.

Claude generated a table showing how things looked before and after. Low Priority came out to 134 out of 287 feeds: nearly half the list, which means most of them weren’t actually being read. Over time, I plan to revisit that Low Priority list, prune what I don’t engage with, and get the total down to something manageable.

I used the dinosaur feature in NetNewsWire to find some of the feeds that were reporting nothing. It turns out that some of them are reporting 404s, which means there is an error finding the site. Those were deleted. Some of them had bad or non-existent TLS certificates; I removed those as well. Some RSS feeds basically had nothing in them at all. Perhaps the owners are on vacation or post irregularly. I am going to wait a few months, and if those feeds still have nothing in them, I will delete them from the list.

I would much rather spend time reading 32 to 64 good feeds with posts that I thoroughly enjoy and comment on, rather than scrolling through 287.

When I finished rating all of my blog feeds, I asked Claude to generate a new OPML file, which I then downloaded to my Mac and imported into NetNewsWire. So now I have just three folders: Must Read, Skim, and Low Priority.

This works great for me. I’m saving a lot of time because I spend most of my time in the folder that says “Must Read”, reading through those. If there’s nothing there to read, then I go to Skim when I have time.

Claude read the original OPML file, applied my ratings by folder position, and wrote a new OPML. The script did not judge any feed. It only applied my choices.

The Low Priority total is 134 before the duplicate was removed, so the final folder holds 133. The final folders hold 62, 77 and 133 feeds (272 in all).

Original folderFeedsMust ReadSkimLow PriorityDeleted
Photographers64243541
Analogue58812362
Blogger44513242
Fujifilm4477300
News1522110
Read & Trust124440
Information Security111271
Life Style111073
Locals Blogs76001
New Jersey Bloggers50005
Photography News51130
Aquaria30030
Nerds31020
Other20020
Photo Challenge21010
Formula 110100
Bequia00000
Total287617713415

Here’s my list of must read blogs.

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