I don't know what motivates me to do certain things, I just go with it. I started this little blogroll project about 2 months ago, I finally finished it today and it probably took me all of 10 minutes to finish. So now I wonder why I just didn't finish it 2 months ago. I'll never know.
Actually most of the work happened behind the scenes with the blogs; I did some major house cleaning in my Google Reader and reorganized everything. I also got rid a few blogs I either don't read anymore or had invalid feeds for. I utilized Google Reader's tagging structure a little differently, instead of "tagging", like I did before (some feeds went into several categories), I actually use the tags more as folders. Every feed goes into exactly two folders/tags/categories (they all mean different things but Google doesn't seem to care), one descriptive tag and one action tag. The descriptive ones are exactly as they sound, the hardest part was coming up with the labels and then determining what labels would be public and which weren't. The action labels are numbered so they always appear at the top of my reader. I sort of modeled this process after this blog post on 43 Folders:
Sink or Swim: Managing RSS Feeds with Better Groups
Which I now realize I don't subscribe to 43 Folders, I think I actually read most of their posts through Lifehacker. Funny how that works.
I wanted to keep descriptive tags and I also wanted action groups at the top so here are my first 3 groups:
1 Everyday
2 Can't Miss
3 Skip 'em
Ok, so it turns out that I don't read the first one every day but it is still a million times more manageable than before. I am still reading the things I really want to read first, the things I would like to read second, and it even turns out that the "Skip 'em" category accounts for a lot of stuff that I don't feel bad about not reading. Only once now the number in "Skip 'em" got over 1000 and I marked all read and never looked back!
The reason why I kept the descriptive groups was because I wanted to try using Google Reader as my blogroll. I had one on my blog before but I never seemed to update it. It seemed to make more sense to push those links through dynamically. My categories are designed in a way that some are public and some are private, depending on what it is I'm saving to that category. I have 27 total tags in Google Reader right now and I'm only sharing about 14.
A couple of special tags include the "Tryout" category (private). That's just one I created to try out a new blog without actually committing it to my reader or blogroll yet. Not sure how well that will work, but I thought it might give it a shot. I have an "ego feed" category that keeps track of the various things ego feeds keep track of, and categories for keeping track of tags through del.icio.us and technorati that are of interest to me. As I was writing this blog post I also did some more rearranging and created a category called "Omnifarious" (public). Other than being a super cool word, I decided it was best way to group people without actually grouping them. They're people I know in person, online, from school, or whatever. Much better than labeling people "Miscellaneous", don't you think?
The one problem I have with the blogroll on my website is the formatting. I like the categories, I don't even mind the "read more" link under each one, but I do wish that link was right justified. It looks a bit cluttered. Right now I don't know if there is much I can do about that, but that's how I'm going to keep it for the time being.
I've also been tinkering with blogrolls recently but, for now at least, I'm sticking to a more disorganised approach; plan B is to keep my favourites on technorati (need to rescue a couple more from the old plan) which helpfully orders them all be freshness. I know I would be useless at keeping things in the right everyday/unmissable/missable buckets so if it's fresh and the title catches my eye, I'll read it. Otherwise, I won't. I might go and remove a favourite if I eventually notice I never read it... although even that seems unlikely. Would very much like to do a better job of categorising blogs though... another day.
I can't help but categorize, it's an unfortunate byproduct of being a librarian. This setup has been working for me though. Unfortunately it doesn't matter how well organized things are, at the end of the day you still need to take the time to actually read them.
I don't use Technorati all that much to read blogs. I think I use it more to create feeds for things like conferences or events I like to track. It works pretty well if you have at least one good tag for that event.
One future endeavor I would like to tackle is to completely reorganize my del.icio.us tags. I was quite inspired by Andy's recently, they put mine to shame! Actually my del.icio.us tag organization is a bit embarrassing considering my job is to organize information.