One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to deal more effectively with the volumes of information arriving in my inbox and feed reader. To that end, here are some great tips for Google Reader:

A Three-Dimensional Approach to Organizing Your Feeds Using Google Reader

…a multi-tiered approach to classifying and reading your feeds using an often ignored feature of [Google Reader].The Problem

The fundamental problem is input management. Most of us simply have too many feeds to read in a single sitting. How can we be sure we’re reading the right content at the right time? Are we reading too much? Too little? The goal is to avoid the anti-GTD state of not being sure - a state that consumes valuable brain resources and keeps you from functioning at your best.

That’s what this system helps you do: it lets you instantly choose which feeds to read at any given time - allowing you to feel fully satisfied when you’re done with a session.

The System
The first thing we’re going to do is make three categories of tags/labels within Google Reader (think folders for old-schoolers). These are:

1. Priority
2. Subject
3. Location

Mine look like this:

* Priority (general importance): Primary, Secondary, Tertiary
* Subject (classical organization): Security, Programming, Design, Humor
* Location (contextual consideration): Industry News, Important World Events, etc.

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For me, email used to be an asynchronous communication technology. I would log on and read email when I had time for it. In the past few years however, I have come to rely on email for communication that requires my immediate attention. Email messages that are not time sensitive become a distraction and I would prefer to shunt them to my RSS aggregator. So I have developed a natural aversion to email subscriptions, newsletters, and listservs.

This aversion put me in a spot since I recently learned about the geowanking listserv. I looked through the archive and this is a conversation that I want to be a part of. So I looked into techniques for getting email subscriptions as an RSS feed. I found three viable methods:

Some scripts exist for this (e.g. pipermail to rss) but they work by screen-scraping the archives which can be a burden on the server. This is a good solution for the list owner who can then provide the feed but each reader who uses this method is adding stress to the server.

No Such Weblog:

Here is the software I’m currently using to turn a number of ICANN-related mailing list archives into RSS feeds. The script can deal with most common mhonarc configurations and with pipermail archives (as used by mailman). If it can’t cope with an archive you want to turn into an RSS feed, it’s relatively easy to customize. Thanks go to Wendy Seltzer and Bret Fausett for contributing code and asking the right questions.(Note that this script works by actually walking through the list archives using HTTP. If you have direct control over an mhonarc installation’s configuration, there’s a more resource-friendly alternative.)

Bloglines has native support for this feature. A unique email is generated and you subscribe to the listserv using it. Nice work bloglines!

Google Reader (my preferred aggregator) does not support this natively but there is a work-around using Google Groups (see pic below). Now if I can figure out how to populate this feed with all of the previous posts, I will be 100%