Leon Mika

After posting about how I zeroed out my feed reader (which, I will conceded, was largely a result of making things that didn’t interest me as “read”) I was asked how many feeds I actually subscribe to:

@lmika Ok. Crucial questions are: how many source do you have on RSS reader and how many news did you have to see on it. 😅

Ah, a good opportunity to do a quick audit over my current feeds. An activity that’s long overdue if I may add: I saw others do similar things a little while ago, and I started to do this myself, but I got distracted, and eventually deleted the draft I was working on. If you’re reading this, it means I’ve actually followed through this time.

So, total number of feeds I subscribed to. On the surface, a relatively easy thing to work out: just export OPML and count the number of nodes. But I thought of going a little deeper. I have been noticing my feed reader being relatively quiet recently, and I was curious as to how often certain feeds are pushing new items. While I do have some news-based subscriptions — mainly around technology — most of the feeds I follow are personal blogs, or projects thereof, and are largely not governed by the need to publish daily. That said, I do expect some pattern of posting schedules to emerge, and I was curious as to whether things have just been a little quiet, or whether it’s just that I don’t follow feeds that are updated often.

So along with doing a general count, I thought I’d consult Feedbin’s frequency analysis and break the count down into how “busy” the feeds are. The way I did this was simple enough:

1. Go to the Subscriptions tab in the Feedbin Settings
2. Filter out feeds to my own sites
3. Filter out feeds that aren’t to personal blogs or publications. Examples of these might be Github activity feeds, or feeds to blog rolls that post links without commentary.
4. Note the feeds average posting frequency. If it’s more than 1 a month, place that feed in the “frequently updated” bucket.
5. If the average is zero, note when Feedbin has last pulled an item. If it’s less than a year ago, place that feed in the “infrequently updated” bucket.
6. Otherwise, consider that feed abandoned.

Here’s the result:

Here’s a breakdown of the “frequently updated” feeds, based on the average calculated by Feedbin. The cutoff points are a little arbitrary, which is why the weekly and fortnightly post counts are much lower compared to the daily or monthly:

And here’s a breakdown of the “infrequently updated” feeds, based on when their last post was received:

So from the data, it does look like I subscribe to a number of feeds that are updated quite frequently. As to why things have been a little quiet: well, I suspect it’s because people are posting less. There’s a lot going on so I can understand that, although I have noticed a few people rediscovering social media, and I’m wondering if they’re moving away from their blogs.

Another reason might be that I’m just not reading as much recently. My reading patterns vary based on my interests and moods, and it’s not unheard of to just mark an entire feed as read if I feel like skipping a day. Also of note that the more frequent feeds generally (although not always) have the smaller posts, so it’s takes no time to read through them all. I’m more likely to go through a few of these while I wait for a build of something, for example. Whereas the longer feeds require a bit more attention, and are likely to be marked as read if they hang about for more than a day or so, or if the weight of seeing that feed unread is too much.

But this is pure speculation: none of this is scientific in any way.

As for who I follow specifically, I keep a blog-roll which you can find here. It’s not exhaustive, and probably needs to be updated. But it’s a good indication of who I tend to following.