Monday, December 08, 2008

Use Reader's subscription trends to eliminate dead blogs

By chance I discovered today that Google Reader has an excellent feature for detecting and eliminating dead subscriptions.

It's not a new feature, so rather than add to the blog clutter with a screen shot I'll direct to a nice post with images ...
Using Trends In Google Reader To Manage RSS Overload

... The Subscription Trends can be very useful because it has a list of Inactive feeds where it shows rss feeds which haven’t been updated since months. Hence you just need to start clicking on the delete or trash button and start unsubscribing from those inactive feeds which are just a burden in your reading list...
I found a bunch that have been inactive for 2 years. Some people, like Tim Berners-Lee only publish every 6-18 months, but these don't fall into that category.

Great feature.

2 comments:

jwfrancis said...

Doesn't this kind-of defeat the point of an RSS feed? If it's inactive, it's not in your reading list, but when a new post arrives, you're notified of it without doing anything.

JGF said...

That's why I mentioned Berners-Lee, I left his feed. He updates every 6-18 months.

The ones I removed used to be heavy volume, then vanished.

In one case it's a feed I liked, so I'm going to see if I can find out what happened ...