Keep your RSS feeds under control with Google Reader | Brad Grier - Lifestyle Technology Blog | Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

With all the different types of media coming at me electronically these days, I’m always looking for ways to better manage the flow through the firehose.

One feature that I’ve just discovered, though it’s been in the application for a while, is the Trends view of your Google Reader habits. Yes, we all know that Google is collecting data on you and your activity through the tools, but here’s one way to use that data to your benefit.

In my case, Google Reader Trends view allows me to review inactive or abandoned blogs, and purge them from my reading list. Simply select the Inactive tab from the Trends view and you’ll see the last date Google Reader was able to grab the RSS feed from that site.

Note: This doesn’t necessarily mean that the site is down or the blog has been abandoned. The site owner may have just changed the URL of the RSS feed…in that case, you’ll have to search for the website and resubscribe.

But in my case, I have about 40 blogs that were no longer published, or the last post was over a month ago. For the most part, that’s too long without a post , so they’ve been removed, but some I’ll keep as I know the author posts infrequently, but I always enjoy it when they do.

But that begs the question: How often is ‘often enough’ for the feeds you read? Do you want daily posts or is weekly enough? Or just post when you’ve got something good to say? Hmmm, food for another post, methinks