Farewell, Digg Reader

Unfortunately, Digg announced that Digg Reader is shutting down tomorrow. While I never used Digg Reader as my main RSS feed reader – I’ve got a paid subscription to Feedly – I was very happy to use it as a backup reader for those feeds that weren’t always that great at adhering to the RSS feed standard (I’m looking at you, bringatrailer.com) as it was more forgiving when it parsed feeds. Unfortunately it appears to be another one of the “feed readers are dying” incidents that seems to have started when Google Reader was shut down. There weren’t really that many alternatives in the first place unless one wanted to self host.

RSS is dying, and I may be contributing to the problem?

I’m not suffering from the delusion that my reach is so big that I would actually influence people in their decision to read fewer blog posts. I’m still hoping that I occasionally publish content that will make you want to read more blog posts, not fewer.

That said, opening up my Feedly home page and seeing that I’ve got over a thousand unread posts shows me that I need to cut down on the feeds I’m barely ever looking at. As a result, I’m going through a big feed cull at the moment. I’m canning any feed I haven’t looked at for about a month. I’m also cleaning out a bunch of feeds pointing to old blogs that don’t seem to see any updates anymore,  and don’t add another unless I remove at least one old feed. While there are so many great blogs out there, at the end of the day there is only a finite amount of time I can spend reading other people’s blogs. So I’m trying to figure out which ones I get the most value or entertainment out of and knock the other ones on the head.

Are you, dear reader, still following a large-ish number of blogs? Have your blog reading habits changed over the last few years?