Of course, too much RSS is a bad thing. I found myself getting more and more frustrated with all the feeds in my reader (Google Reader) and watching unread items stack up. How would I ever read it all?

Well, I realised that I don’t have to read it all. I noticed that I was reading RSS in two different ways:

1. Finger on the pulse type information. This is essential reading for me and includes a number of blogs by web designers, SEOs and ProBloggers that write top-notch content and indespensible advice. These are the blogs I gain the most from and that I’m most likely to comment and participate in.

2. Non time-sensitive blogs. These will usually be blogs that are outside my key interest areas. They might be blogs about music, parenting or the odd personal blog that I like to read from time to time.

Sorting RSS Feeds By Reading Habits

I decided that Google Reader was the best choice for reading the critical RSS feeds. I could browse full feeds quickly and easily, and navigate between posts with Reader’s handy keyboard shortcuts.

I moved all my less essential feeds over to various tabs in Netvibes. I was able to create a tab for each category of feed and create a ‘wall of news’ where I could see the latest headlines at a glance.

By moving out the less essential feeds, my Google Reader has less clutter and I can browse through my feeds much more quickly. The feeds I have moved to Netvibes can be checked on an ad-hoc basis as I’m really only interested in current news from them.

How Do You Manage Your RSS Subscriptions?

If you’re an RSS addict, why not share your tips on managing your RSS feed?

To hide the sidebar subscriptions list in Reader, simply press the “u” key and it’ll disappear. Press “u” again to make the sidebar reappear.

Doing this can cause the reading pane to jump about a bit, but if you’re stuck for space on a low-resolution monitor, you just might find this useful. Alternatively, go out and buy a bigger monitor.

Favourite Google Reader keyboard shortcuts at the moment are “j” and “k” to move to the next and previous posts respectively. What are yours?

I mentioned a while back that it was possible to republish RSS feeds from your forum on your blog.

How do we achieve this? Well, it’s quite easy actually. With the WordPress RSS widget, you can display the titles from just about any RSS feed you can hook into.

Getting The RSS URL You Want

Right, so let’s look at our Simple Machines forum and see how to extract the latest posts to RSS. Here’s my forum. It’s divided into several categories, with boards for specific topics. You can fetch an RSS feed for any board or topic easily….if you know how to structure the URL.

Categories

Let’s say we want to display the latest posts in my Reality TV category. The URL looks something like this /index.php?action=collapse;c=4;sa=collapse;#4. The key part of the querystring is c=4, which identifies the category. Now, to get Simple Machines Forum to output the category as RSS, let’s recraft the URL a little bit:

/index.php?c=4;type=rss;action=.xml;limit=20

The additional parameters tell SMF to output the category as RSS and show a maximum of 20 items.

Topics

If you wanted to use a specific topic, you can replace the c=4 with board=16.0. Your URL might look something like this:

/index.php?board=16.0;type=rss;action=.xml;limit=20

Setting Up Your WordPress RSS Widget

Now comes the easy bit – adding the feed to WordPress. Go into your wp-admin area and browse to Presentation and then to Sidebar Widgets. Drag in a new RSS Widget to the place in the sidebar you want the widget to appear. Click the configure icon, then paste in the URL you created above.

Once you save your widget, it will instantly on the website (see below).

The only disadvantage is – as you can see from the illustration above – the RSS feed tends to display individual responses, so if you’ve got a string of replies to a thread, that title will be repeated loads of times.

Paul’s post is an excellent introduction and carries instructions on how to use RSS feeds in the real world, including help on setting up Bloglines, My Yahoo, Google’s personalised homepages and many more free RSS reader applications.

Definitely worth a look.

On a related note, RSS technology must be starting to infiltrate the business world to some degree. I read a blog this morning that actually used the phrase “feed management”. Only in the corporate world…..

Update: If you’re still having trouble understanding the concept of RSS, Colin at Uber Geeks has posted a good entry-level description of RSS or, Web Feeds as they’re likely to become known.