I subscribe to a LOT of RSS feeds. Most are of personal interest but some are work-related and others are to keep on top of tech-related news. Some sites publish a lot of articles in a day when only one or two are of interest to me. We’ve covered some basic and advanced RSS tools that can make those more manageable but if there’s no easy way to filter the content you want, just having a good folder structure in your RSS feed reader like Google Reader can go a long ways.
Google Reader’s interface to creating folders is a little hidden. By default, all your feeds go in one big list. If you want to go into a folder of feeds that are related, a folder structure can make it much easier to skim the headlines if the formatting is consistent or the content is more predictable.
Select a feed you would like to put in a folder and click on it from your list on the left-hand side. When it becomes the focus of the right pane, click on the Feed settings… button. You can choose to add the feed to an existing folder (if you have any) or to create a New folder.
After choosing to create a New folder, a little dialog window will popup asking what you would like to name the folder. Give it a descriptive name and hit ‘Ok’.
Now you can see the folder at the top of the list on the right side if you have your list sorted alphabetically. If you have it sorted by drag-and-drop, it will appear at the bottom of the list but you can drag it to anywhere you would like in the list.
To add other feeds to the folder, you can go to each individual feed and choose under Feed settings to add it to the folder or you can just drag and drop from the Subscriptions list to move the feed into the folder you just created. To create additional folders, you just repeat the above steps starting with a different feed you want to file.
If you have a site that might flood your feed reader or you always want to open, using folders and going through them before the All Items list can help you get through the feeds quickly while highlighting the feeds you don’t want to miss.