In
my previous post about RSS addiction, I talked about how I can't stop adding feeds to my reader. I finished off the post by mentioning that my total count of unread items is so huge that it makes me feel hopeless about ever reading everything I've subscribed to. Since the time of that post, I have subscribed to more feeds, and my unread count has grown significantly. Right now, I don't even know how many unread items I have. No, really; the feeling of helplessness had gotten so unpleasant that I have turned off display of unread counts. If I don't see how large the number is, it can't disappoint me as much. This is my first step towards enjoying my feeds more.
Unfortunately for me, the intimidating unread count is merely the tip of the iceberg. I'm the type of person who feels that the proper way to a read a blog is chronologically, which means that my number of unread items is more probably in the thousands. I believe in reading chronologically for two main reasons:
- Blog writers will often reference their previous blog posts (such as my link at the top of this post). If an earlier blog post is referenced, this usually implies that the user could benefit by reading (or having read) it. If you're reading reverse-chronologically, and decide to follow a reference, your flow is broken - your reading of the current post gets interrupted. Furthermore, you're jumping to some point in the blog which is (most likely) not near your previous location, and you begin to lose an understanding of how much and what part of the blog you've actually read (OK, this might be an indication of slight OCD). And then, what if the referenced post references another post? You make another jump. And what if the writer references several posts?
- Often, my intent is to read every blog post, to exhaust everything a blog has to offer. Or, to be more specific, I don't want to miss anything. It's like reading the "choose your own adventure" novels as a child - you can't just follow one path and stop reading, you read through all the endings so that you don't miss any possibilities. Now I'm all grown up and I can't get into a blog without first finishing its archives. So, given that I wish to not miss a single article, let's assume that I will indeed finish reading all the articles. If I'm going read every post, it clearly makes more sense to read the articles in the order that they were posted, rather than in reverse (especially for the reasons mentioned in point #1).
The problem, however, lies in the assumption in point #2 that I will finish reading all the articles. Some blogs have such extensive archives that finishing them is too daunting a task. I've recently started reading the
Coding Horror archives. Today I took a look at the task ahead of me, and I was shocked to find that the archive list was gigantic. The scrollbar was tiny (that was the first thing I noticed). The archives begin around the start of 2004, and the post frequency is almost daily. I was disappointed by the realization that it would take me far too long to finish this blog's archives.
Now, I want to consider my reaction upon seeing the blog's archives, as well as my regard for reading the archives as a "task ahead of me." I notice that when I am reading through a blog's archives I am not enjoying myself. I feel like I am performing a chore - doing something that needs to be completed before I can do what I want to do. Although I desire to read through the archives before I can follow the new content, this desire is not spawned by enjoyment that the task brings me. Rather it is spawned as an attempt to avoid the unsettling feeling of incompleteness. The entire time I spend going through archives, I am only waiting for them to be over, to be able to just keep up with the latest updates. For this reason I was disappointed at seeing the extensive Coding Horror archives; it meant that I had a lot of work ahead of me before I could enjoy the blog.
This is not a healthy way to approach and read a blog - I have to rethink my methods. I need to scrap my desire to read chronologically. I need to suppress the feeling brought about by following a blog I haven't "completed." I recognize that what I enjoy about a blog is keeping up with updates, and what I don't enjoy is putting that off until I can finish the archives. What I have just done (I did it just now while writing this post) is I have marked everything in my Google Reader as read. Zero unread count! Yay. This will help me see recent updates, and keep up with them as I enjoy doing. As for archives, they'll be sitting on the backburner, to be read after I've seen the latest updates, bit by bit.
What a simple solution! Now to wait and see if it works...
