Virtual Pack Rat
Jan 4th, 2006 by Karen
Today I freaked out when I got into Bloglines and saw how many “saved” posts I had. Over 200 and most of them are from at least a month ago. When I see something interesting that might be helpful, I can’t help but mark it to read later. The problem is that I read so many feeds and have so little time that I never get back to some of the stuff. Ironically, I am not so attached to physical things. I was home over the holidays and had no trouble cleaning out my room at my parents house. However, I am a virtual pack rat. I keep every little thing I download, I save heaps of posts in Bloglines, my FURL account is out of control, my iPhoto has more pictures than I know what to do with, every paper or memo I’ve every written is neatly organized on my computer.So every once in a while I “wipe the slate clean” in Bloglines and get rid of everything I’ve marked or still haven’t read. At some point I should probably do something similar with my computer, but I can’t quite convince myself of the benefits particularly since I can always get a bigger hard drive.
I had the same problem with bloglines. My solution was to use del.icio.us for that function. So rather than just saving them, I click on the link, post, and file them away under useful tags so that I can find them when I need them. (”Hmm… now where did I see that cool javasript library?”) It’s awesome. I even tag stuff that I don’t read but maybe-someday could be useful. I know people that have thousands of saved pages and they are all easy to find (great search function). Never seems to get too cluttered.
I’ve tried to clear all of my unread saved posts, but it doesn’t work. I still see them showing up in grey in parentheses. How do I clear the *really* old ones? I can’t retrieve them to read them or clear them with ‘mark all read’.
The only way I know how to unmark all the things you’ve marked as new is to go through and individual uncheck them. Its a royal pain in the butt and Bloglines should consider a button that will undo all the “Mark as New” checkboxes.