Goodbye Feeds

Recently I accidentally deleted all my Google Reader RSS feeds!

To be honest I haven’t been getting the best out of Google Reader af late because, I suspect, it had become too overwhelming. There were hundreds of articles lurking there taunting me. I would just scroll through them, barely even skimming them, just to try and get that damned ‘Unread’ count down.

Anyway I decided to have a bit of a clean-up and get rid of the feeds I’m not likely to read anymore. Follow the steps through with me and see if you can spot the deliberate mistake:

1. Select ‘Settings’
2. Select ‘Subscriptions’
3. Select ‘All Subscriptions’
4. Untick the boxes next to the feeds that I don’t want
5. Click the ‘Unsubscribe’ button

Did you spot it? Yep, there at number 4 – I should have unticked the ones I wanted to keep. I ended-up doing the exact opposite of what I intended and kept the feeds that I didn’t want.

So, after a bit of quiet cursing and a few I-don’t-believe-I-just-did-thats, I deleted everything and now I’m gradually rebuilding my feed list.

Looking at this episode from a positive point-of-view, it’s really a blessing in disguise. It gives me the opportunity to rebuild my feed list based on my current interests and there’s no inner struggle about deleting comfortable old feeds that have been there forever and whose faces I’ve grown accustomed to but were no longer providing any benefit to me.

When I first started using GReader, I went on a bit of a feeding frenzy. I subscribed to many feeds based on a single good post. This time I’m trying to be a bit more selective and only subscribing to feeds on sites where I find several posts of interest.

The net result is that I’m actually reading more, I can clear my unreads in a short amount of time and using GReader has become a pleasure again rather than a chore.

Perhaps I should arrange a similar ‘accident’ with my Hard Drives – I have a similar problem there too.