Bad Glacier

I think I’ve finally figured out the trick to efficient blog reading. In Bloglines, I’ve always had my blogs organized into groups based on the blog’s topic or the blogger’s occupation. I had the political blogs, the pre-law blogs, the blawgs, etc. all organized in separate groups.

Recently, I started organizing my blogs by priority. Some blogs I read whenever there’s a new post. Some blogs I read regularly, but I don’t have to check them every day. Others I read only when I have enough free time. These each get their own group. I also have a group for blogs with partial feeds, where only the headline or a short excerpt from the post gets aggregated. These are just a pain in the ass, so they get their own category in my aggregator, so I can visit the site when enough posts get built up to make it worth my while.

This way, I can look at my aggregator and instantly know if there are any blogs I should check, depending on how much free time I have. I can work my way through the higher-priority blogs first, and I never feel like I’m unfairly ignoring anyone.

I suppose if I was really hardcore, I could make priority groups for each of my original categories (”political” or “blawgs” or whatever), but I don’t yet have enough blogs aggregated to make this worthwhile.