How do you read your feeds? (Yet another flimsy pretext to talk about myself.)

Firstly, the background for this question. I have absolutely no idea where I read this (it is presumably amongst my 1800+ bookmarks), but I recall reading acouple of posts a while back about how there is a trend of people preferring to find items of interest through linklogs, feeds of shared items than through ‘normal’ Atom/RSS feeds and places like Twitter and FriendFeed (partially relying on serendipity to deliver them interesting stuff).

I asked this question on Twitter and, consequently, also on FriendFeed. If you are familiar with both services, you might’ve guessed correctly that the conversation’s at FF.

So how do you read your feeds? Do you stick to a feed reader like Google Reader, Bloglines or FeedDemon? Or do you prefer to stumble upon (to borrow a term) new content via places like del.icio.us and Twitter/FF (or through feeds of shared items like in Google Reader)? Do you use one or a combination or both? (The conversation linked to above leads me to believe that, as almost everyone else on the entire intarwebs would probably have predicted, Google Reader and FriendFeed are popular in this area.)

Now I’m going to go off on a slight tangent to talk about myself and my own web habits. I’ve often had troubles keeping up with Google Reader and Twitter. In the past month or two, I’ve added FriendFeed to that (and only recently have I been actually using it). This just meant that, in addition to my work and studies, I’ve been ridiculously overwhelmed.

At one point, I was subscribed to some 126 feeds (and that was after some previous feed-pruning). By a fortnight ago, I’d made it down to 28 feeds. I was proud of that.

But I asked myself how else I could reduce the number of feeds I was reading and so claim back even more time for my actual life (indeed, it does exist).

Firstly, I stopped using Greader and imported all my feeds into Firefox via its built-in Live Bookmarks feature. One reason was because Greader was becoming slower for me, even after I’d systematically ditched some hundred feeds. Another was that Firefox is ‘closer to home’ - it’s on my desktop and I don’t have to go to a website to look at content from other websites. Don’t get me wrong, I still love Greader, but I just feel like I don’t have any more use for it.

Secondly, I added two must-have Firefox add-ons if you use Live Bookmarks - LiveClick (at Mozilla Add-ons), which enhances your Live Bookmarks experience with some fairly basic functionality which Firefox really ought to have by default anyway, and Feed Sidebar (at Mozilla Add-ons), which gives you a sidebar for your feeds and extra functionality (some of it similar to LiveClick’s).

Then I rationalised. Slashdot’s has always been a feed I’ve subscribed to and I read most of the articles from it. So I’ll visit the website instead (it’s now my homepage). I got rid of a couple more feeds I don’t need. There are a couple of feeds (like the Paleo-Future feed) that I’ll read occasionally, but not obsessively - I’ve placed those in my Gmail account’s Web Clips, where I put my ‘every so often’ feeds. I’ve added even more Slashboxes to my Slashdot homepage so I can keep track of places like New Scientist and OS News. Miscellaneous feeds (including comics) are kept as Live Bookmarks. Another way I’ve found of pruning blog feeds is just by following their authors on FriendFeed or Twitter.

(Side-note: I write my posts in HTML rather than the visual editor. I tell you, the last paragraph looks like an absolute mess.)

And that’s how I manage my online reading life. Now, back to my real life.

To conclude, I’ll do what everyone else does when they talk about Twitter or FriendFeed - give links to their accounts. I am fyc on Twitter and fyc on FriendFeed as well (Oh my goodness, what a shock!).

Cheerio(s).

Edit: Comments to and likes of this post can be found here and here on FriendFeed.