Feed Reader Blues

Every six months or so, I try to prune my list of RSS feeds that I subscribe to. Partly to delete dead feeds, or those that I don’t read, and partly to make sure feeds I want and need to read are grouped and stacked to make it easy on me to keep up.

Well, it’s been nearly a year, and since I’m prone to stumble on something cool, hit “subscribe,” throw it in a folder and move on, I’d managed to accumulate nearly 1,000 feeds. No one can keep up with all that noise! And, frankly, there’s a lot of echo in that chamber.

I couldn’t sleep tonight, so I figured why not take care of this mundane task. I have been using Google Reader for the last year, and I’d had issues with the subscription management page in the past. With 900+ feeds and the default display set to “all,” you can imagine the kind of server and client power needed to render that huge list in all its AJAX-y glory. Too much, it turns out, for Google to handle.

So I exported the OPML file of all my feeds and edited by hand in TextEdit. Good times. The problem is, to delete all my existing feeds and replace them with the new set of feeds and folders, I have to get into the “manage subscriptions” page that’s borking. I could set up a new account, but guess what — since Reader is tied to my Google account, I’d have to sign out and log in every time I went from GMail to Reader, for instance.

So I went back to Bloglines, and while I struggled with the regular version a bit, the Beta version worked great. The fact is, if you’ve got an assload of RSS feeds, Google Reader just can’t handle ‘em. I haven’t given up on the service — presuming I can get the settings page to work properly I will take a stab at re-uploading my new feed set — but they really need a feature to delete all subscriptions (possibly on import), if not manage multiple OPML files.