cleaning out the crap
When I realised that I was actually scared to look at my Bloglines subscription after not looking at it for a couple of days, I knew that I had a problem.
Friday afternoon, I went through my subscribed feeds and I unsubscribed to over two-thirds of them.
The hard part, but ultimately the most liberating, was forcing myself to cut the ties with feeds that I had had for a long time but I was really just holding onto for nostalgia (or entropy) and not for any real advantage to myself.
The hardest to get rid of was Slashdot. I finally had to admit that if there was anything interesting posted to Slashdot in the past few months, I had also seen it posted on digg.com or elsewhere. Slashdot used to be one of the very first sites I went to everyday, but I had to admit that it had lost its relevance for me.
That was my first attempt to clean some of the cruft that has cluttered up my day-to-day life. I still have more to do, including:
- Reformatting my computer
- Cleaning out the piles of crap in the computer room
- The basement. O, the basement. Throwing out the old boxes. Ripping out the ratty shelves. Repainting the walls… and the floor.
Sounds like fun, eh?
January 9th, 2006 at 7:43 pm
I haven’t really read Slashdot regularly for a few years, but when it comes to such collaborative discussion sites, I’m a nomad. I gave up Slashdot in favour of Kuro5hin around 2001, and then moved over to MetaFilter in 2002, and now I’m more of a regular around SportsFilter than anywhere else. Someday I’ll find a home.
I’m also more of a blo.gs kinda guy. Not having my blogroll indexed by individual articles means less cleaning out. It’s still got a lot of reliability issues though.
January 10th, 2006 at 10:47 am
The biggest problem I found over time is that having a large blogroll can become something of an echo chamber — with a variety of sites all linking to the same material.
I had to remember which sites over time were the best at aggregating the info I was reading the soonest and unsubscribe from the sites that I was just skimming because I had read it all before.
January 11th, 2006 at 11:27 am
digg.com rocks!!! You’ll also want to check the podcast at diggnation.com
rawks!!!
January 11th, 2006 at 11:50 am
Yo Otto! Long time, buddy! It’s got a good podcast? I guess I should check it out. Podcasting is one of those things that I have merely dabbled in, due to lack of time. God knows I have little enough of it.