Quite often you find a blog that looks interesting and you subscribe to it. Not long and you are unable to read all new post a day. Worse if you stayed a weekend of the Internet.
The google reader
Trends page will show you how many posts and the percentage you read of a subscription. Also how many posts you
starred and
shared. There is also a list with
items a day (over the last 30 days) and in reverse order the date of the last post.
For me I defined some rules to use the statistics to find feeds I
- need to read
- my read if I have some time left
- could unsubscribe
Process the whole feed in one pass. This prevents me from looking at the same post twice. An entry I've read and found interesting will be
marked
as read. An article of more general interest to my friends, will be
shared. If it is only of interest to one or two, the post will be
mailed directly to them.
If I'm in a hurry and not able to read an interesting post complete or need more time to follow all links referenced the post will be
stared.
At the end of the feed
mark all as read. This will remove the posts from the list and add they as
not read to the statistic.
The art of reading feeds like this to keep the list with
stared posts near zero.
Regularly you should delete feeds where the number of read posts is under 10%. Or could this number be higher? Lots of posts I'm interested in get posted to several feeds I read.
At this time google reader will display only up to 40 feeds in the statistic and it is not possible to change the order. If you subscribed to more than 40 feeds you can't see the ones you haven't read even one post from :-(
Also missing is the date you subscribed to the feed. As the statistic is for the last 30 days, the numbers are bogus if you subscribed less than 30 days ago.
