For the second week of organizing your geek life, I’m tackling RSS Readers after last week’s look at personalized homepages.  These helpful aggregators of all you love and enjoy can quickly become and overbearing chore.  You want to read everything, but all these damn bloggers just write too damn much (sorry).  I subscribe to more than 200 feeds, flooding me with posts by the minute and leaving great, but infrequent bloggers lost in the shuffle.  Here are some pointers on controlling the insanity.

The struggle with RSS readers is how to stay informed but also have fun - don’t stress about unread items and such.  The problem is I don’t want to have to mark each feed read, but I also don’t just want to mark everything read.  This is why organizing feeds by topic becomes unwieldy - it doesn’t prioritize reading.

The other challenge is preparing my reader for ideal mobile viewing.  I don’t want any partial feeds or aggregating sites like Digg.  This led to my somewhat complex tagging system that you can of course tweak as needed.

I organize my Google Reader by prioritized tags of how I read, as suggested by 43 Folders’ Matt Wood.  I even use numbers in front of the tags to manipulate their order (cause Google Reader doesn’t have manual tag sorting).  First is Can’t miss.  These are the most important feeds that I can’t miss.  These are always full feeds to I can read them anywhere any time (more on that in a bit).

Then I have categories, in this order:

• News - news blogs, often shorter posts that I can browse headlines quickly
• Aggregators - Digg, Reddit, Mixx all contained so I can avoid them when reading on my mobile
• Columns - These are the longer form, less frequent, often one person blogs that are more commentary than news (like Prodigeek).
• Humor - Web comics, video, fun stuff like that
• Features - For multi-page articles that I can’t easily turn into partial feeds (I’m getting there, I’m getting there)

I also am experimenting with a General interest tag for feeds I want searchable but don’t want to read and an Official blogs tag for, well, official blogs.

I’m still sorting which blogs go where, but overall this has been very efficient.  I go through can’t miss morning, noon, and night.  I look at the aggregators next for the most important news and sites followed by the actual news tag for very quick perusing.  Then, depending on my time, I scan the columns slowly for interesting posts, often starring articles for later reading.

For an alternative method, I tried out a straight tiered system, 1st-tier, 2nd-tier, and 3-tier, as recommended by GenuineChris.  The problem with this method was I just had too many feeds and an impossible time figuring out what constituted 2nd and 3rd-tier (1st-tier became Can’t miss).  Within a week I couldn’t figure out what I should be reading and the lack of easily filtering out partial feed sites made mobile viewing a chore.

Which brings me to the ever important partial feed quandary.  I’m certain the inevitable "stealing content" whine will catch on to this soon), but until then you can, with some effort, turn partial feeds into full feeds using Yahoo! Pipes.  This powerful tool helps you aggregate blogs for your aggregator helping lighten your blog load.  Fetch Full Feed is a slightly advanced way of making your reader more readable and is the easiest way I know (it requires some basic HTML knowledge).  Please comment any other suggestions you have.  Yahoo! Pipes also has excellent filtering and merging tools to improve your reader (get rid of weekly wrap ups and podcasts if you want).  You can also use AideRSS to filter only the most popular posts, judged by popularity on social networks.  The downside is some feeds get delayed by a few days waiting for them to become viral.

Beyond that, your options are still pretty overwhelming, from what reader to pick to what feeds to read.  Even though Google Reader lacks many features I want (filtering, tag renaming) it is still the most robust web reader - clean and efficient (no ads) and there are dozens of excellent Greasemonkey scripts to improve your experience.  FeedDemon is a quality desktop based reader that syncs with NewsGator on the web.  Google’s Google Gears just isn’t efficient enough for desktop reading yet, but I’ve always preferred web-based - easy portability and such (there is potential for desktop options).

So how do you organize your reader?

Next week, we’ll look at organizing your real, computer desktop (yes, you still have one).