Nev n Dave

The image above shows the categories I (Nev) have in bloglines .

Tip 7 from part 1 of Top 10 tips for effective blog reading is to re-organise your categories. But how do you do it?

Here’s how I went from my old category system to this one.

1. Decided on category names
2. Went through all my old categories and moved my feeds into the new categories, being fairly rough in my distribution. When I was at all unsure, I’d put them into the “5 Priority” category
3. Now as I read them I constantly adjust their positions. If I notice myself looking in a lower priority category to read a blog before higher priority blogs, I take action on that and swap the blogs around.

It only took me about 30 minutes or so and the benefits are great. I don’t feel like I’m potentially missing out on good stuff because I’ve made sure it’s at the top of my list.

I rejected quite a few schemes before settling on the category names above.

• I first considered frequency. It may be handy for some but I don’t feel I’m structured enough to only look at a Daily category daily and a Weekly category weekly.
• Naming the categories with names like “Most Important”, “Pretty Important”, etc felt a bit too restrictive.
• So I settled on the fairly abstract names above.
• No matter what naming system you come up with, it’s a good idea to put numbers at the front of the category names - that way they’ll appear in the correct order.