5 Easy Tips for Managing 100s of RSS Feeds

(Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes)

RSS is an incredibly efficient method for keeping track of blogs.

Given millions of blogs on the internet, how in the world can anyone keep up with all that information?

It’s not that hard.

The first and by far most important action you can do with your RSS feed is learn to clean it up fast. Here’s how I do it:

Cleaning your RSS feed: Marking All Read in Google Reader

Marking All Read in Google Reader

Here’s some helpful tips:

  1. Not every post on every blog is worth reading or commenting upon. Don’t leave dumb comments! Just move to the next.
  2. For most blogs, you will find there’s a certain “periodicity.” That is, you’ll be interested in every 3rd, 4th or 5th article published on the blog, not every single article. Hubspot Inbound Marketing is a perfect example for me. They publish at least daily, but pique my interest about once a week. They know their business, so I continue to follow their feed.
  3. You will see that titles matter a lot. When you’re scanning 100s of titles, what doesn’t stand out doesn’t get read. There are exceptions. Hazel Dooney’s articles (NSFW) have very short titles, but I read them all. Other blogs post really long titles, but I’m not interested in another “313 SEO Tips to Make You Sexier, Better Looking and Cure Insomnia.”
  4. You need to clean your feed regularly. See instructions above. When you have a clean feed, you can run your reader continuously during the day, and comment on articles as they get posted. Very convenient. Before you shut down for the day, clean your feed again.
  5. Some feeds are title only. I’m watching uncrate, zappos and gearculture for a client in the retail travel luggage space. Retail travel luggage is her bailiwick, but I need to know just a little bit about what’s being marketed, and how it’s being marketed, to better help her.

I bet you have a tip or two of your own. Would you like to share in the comments?

WordPress Gotcha! Find Out If Your RSS Feed is Helping or Hurting

(Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes)

Your blog’s Feedburner RSS feed won’t update. Do you know what to do? Josh Kohlbach does. Here’s what Josh has to say about the matter.

Feedburner icon

Feedburner icon


Here’s a WordPress Gotcha! that I stumbled across recently:

No matter how many times I pinged Feedburner, they wouldn’t update my feed with my latest articles.

After trying to ping my feed many times over with no success I took it a step further and tried to Resync my feed (generally something you do as a last resort according to FeedBurner) and it was then that I discovered what the real problem was.

My feed’s file size was too big!

I knew immediately that it would be some WordPress setting that I mistakenly set early on which was pushing my feed size up. But I really wanted to find out just how big it was.

How To Find Out Your Feed’s Size

A great way to find out how big your RSS feed has grown to is to check with Web-Sniffer’s handy little tool.

This basically allows you to check certain meta data about any website page you input, including RSS feeds – perfect!

To check this you’ll actually need the address that points to your original feed. For me (and most WordPress users) it was just a matter of adding /feed to the end of my site’s URL.

My feed size was just over 512kb which is quite a lot considering all that actually counts toward your feed’s file size is the text that features in your posts.

The Cause

After a little more searching around on the web I discovered that the average feed only stores between 10 and 25 full sized posts – even on the busiest blogs.

I checked my settings in WordPress under Settings->Reading and low and behold, I was storing over 150 backlogged posts in my RSS feed. Way too much – which explains the enormous size of my original RSS feed.

The Fix

I tapered this Syndication feeds setting back to 25 previous posts and pinged my feed using Feedburner’s ping tool. After that it updated all the posts that were “stuck” in the pipeline.


You gotta Gotcha? Wanna post it here on Website In A Weekend? Send it on along.


Josh Kohlbach is a professional freelance programmer and web designer based in Brisbane, Australia. Josh's blog Code My Own Road is packed with small business tips and technical tutorials for Do-It-Yourself entrepreneurs.