Cleaning Up Your Feed Subscriptions

Today, I spent a few minutes and “cleaned up” the feeds that I am subscribed to.  It is quite simple to do – you simply open up your feed reader, then go through and modify, rearrange, or delete the feeds that you are no longer interested in, haven’t updated, etc.

Why You’ll Want to Clean Up Your Feeds

Each month, many blogs stop posting or change focus, leading you to feeds that rapidly accumulate in the main area, without even being read.  This causes a problem on your side – you simply cannot keep up-to-date and actually enjoy reading the posts from sites you want to read.  Take the time out, at least once every four months, to go through and organize your feed reader – it’ll make reading your favorite sites even easier.

Main Sites (Subscriptions) to Delete

• Sites that haven’t posted within the past two months (or any period you find unacceptable).
• Feeds that are more ads than posts, or feeds that you can’t read because they are excerpts.
• Posts that come in faster than you can read them, i.e. blogs that publish 15-20+ posts per day.
• Sites that have moved location, along with the feed, so there won’t be any additional updates.
• Sites with owner changes and no new posts.
• Sites that focus on sponsored posts, with no valuable content.

How to Clean Your Feed Reader

In Google Reader, it is rather simple.  Click on the feed from the left panel (where they are all listed, then click Feed Settings > Unsubscribe.  Another way to do this is through the Settings > Subscription panel, where you can click the trash can icon to unsubscribe from the feed or change the folder.

You should also take the time to tag, label, or place the feeds in categories, so you can only browse the feeds in categories that you want to read on particular days.  For example, some people may only want to read “Lifestyle” blogs on the weekend, so this can be done by only selecting the categories (folders) on those days, saving time during the week, marking those posts as ‘read’.

Here’s What I Found

A majority of the sites that I unsubscribed from today stopped posting in the May – Beginning of September period, as I had cleaned out the subscriptions shortly before this period.  A majority of the sites addressed that they were changing focus as their last post, and never continued posting.  Others had valuable content as their last post, but couldn’t continue.

Some sites changed their blog’s main address, often making it shorter, but I didn’t subscribe to the new site’s feed, as they stopped posting there, too.

Keep this in mind: Don’t let your site become neglected, as I found that many authors had done today.  It doesn’t take much to keep a blog updated, even if the content isn’t as valuable after you switch to a one-paragraph format, sharing a few thoughts each day.  The core of blogs is being able to read new content each day and responding to that.  Don’t let your blog become just another “website.”