Stex Toys

My attention was recently drawn to an article on Kottke.org regarding an alternative way to tag your feeds. (See the article Feed Reading) thanks to a shared link on Del.icio.us from Sifter.

It’s main thrust is to, rather than I had been doing, tagging your feeds by area of interest to use more usage based names. For instance I used to have a section call ‘Tech’ which had all my feeds related to PCs, Home Theatre etc, and then one for News and so on. I now have a set of tags related to how often I make use of the feeds, such that my current list of tags is as follows: (This is heavily based on the suggestions on the original blog)

always
often
sometimes
frippery
photos
links
forums
infoglut
podcasts

As you can see I’ve added a few of my own to the mix, namely forums, for rss feeds for various forums i make us of, normally a specific sub-forum rather than an entire site! And then Podcasts which I use for listening to various podcasts from around the net, which I find best to have in their own tag as they are less to do with when you want to listen to them and more if you are in a place suitable for it.

This is all done with Google Reader with I find to be a really rather good system to use especially as it has great readability on my BlackBerry when I am out and about. Infact these tags make the process all the better as I only need check always and maybe often if i have a little more time when browsing wirelessly.

In conjunction with this I am making use of the RSS ticker add-on for Firefox. I’ve used this before but having numerous feeds on it becomes tiresome. However now I can just point it at my ‘always’ feed on Google reader and it will just present me with those items I like to know about ASAP. It all comes together really rather nicely.