Day before yesterday, I did some spring cleaning with my blog, feed reader, as well as other stuff on my system. Tuned up the sidebar, making things a little cleaner here and there, removing unnecessary badges / widgets and streamlining the display of content. I also did a major change to the display of my blog's front page. Updated all the posts with a summary post, so that one can only see the trimmed version of the posts on the front page, decreasing the overall length of the earlier never-ending page. Looks much neater now, and gives visibility to more posts per page (although Google would find much lesser similar keywords on the blog's front page and inner pages now, that's a disadvantage I am ready to accept for a cleaner looking, more usable blog). There were some other action items in my spring cleaning todo list, one being the need to explore ways of knowing the number of subscribers to the blog's feed. I haven't published any feedburner feed for this blog and roller didn't show me such an option in the admin CP. I soon found out a cool way of at least getting to know subscribers to your feed using Google products to read the feed (google reader, iGoogle, etc.) -- add the feed to Google reader and look under "show details" > "subscribers".. shows 3 for my sun blog's feed.. :)

Alec Muffett suggested another method at sun's blogging alias -- we can see the same results using Google's webmaster tools under statistics > subscriber stats.. GWT (Google Web Toolkit) is a nice way of looking at how Google is indexing your site, when did googlebot last visit you, exactly which pages did it crawled, any errors the crawler encountered (404, etc.) right down to in-depth diagnostic information, statistics, content analysis, link analysis and more. What I was particularly interested in, at this point of time, was getting to know my blog's subscribers. Lo and behold, it showed me the same number, confirming the validity of both tools (in a way) measuring the same type of subscribers.

That's that, now I will be able to (atleast) measure 70% of the subscriber traffic at my blog without using any special tool / technique.

After that analysis, I was after the next thing, a todo item I was delaying for more than a couple of weeks, the great task of organizing my google reader feed subscriptions. Things had started to become very hotch-potch in my reader lately, owing to me giving little or no care at all to properly tag my feeds and just kept adding on to the haphazardness. This very reason escalated this action item to the top of the list for the weekend and I sought to accomplish some clear organization of feeds in my reader by the end of the day. The earlier system I was following was just, add feed, give it any tag, and move on. I analyzed the type of feeds I had and thought of a fairly clever tagging / categorization scheme, with tags of 3 types:

• Tags by feed source type:
  
  type:Blog, type:Website, type:SharingAndDiscovery, type:BlogAggregator, type:Forum, type:Misc
  
  
• Tags by topic: the content is around which topic(s)
  
  topic:Glassfish, topic:Java, topic:Netbeans, topic:Solaris, topic:Web, topic:VirtualWorlds, topic:OpenOffice, topic:Linux, topic:MySQL, topic:Life, topic:Misc, topic:Misc-Tech
  
  
• misc tags: Other tags which don't need a category of their own
  
  misc:Sun, misc:CA, misc:Blogroll
  

It took hours to re-tag all feeds but is worth the effort. I renamed some old tags to the new sets of tags. Since there's no built-in option to rename tags, you might want to check out this post to learn the cool workaround for that. Now I can filter and look for, example, all the Sun Blog feeds (misc-Sun, type:Blog).. or all the personal blogs of people (topic:Life, type:Blog), or all the Blog Planets (type:BlogAggregators), etc. It's really simple and easy finding the right feed now. Oh, you might be wondering about the blogroll tag. Well, that's one smart tag, and does something cool for me. Over at my personal blog, angadsingh.in I have simply added the blogroll tag feed to Drupal's news aggregator module and show a dynamic blogroll in the sidebar, which I update from within the comfort of Google Reader. Since there is no such option on this blog (the sun blog), there exists another alternative to it, which still works great, and that is to export google reader feeds as OPML, strip out the feeds in other tags from the OPML source and import it into roller using the OPML import feature in the Bookmarks section. Then, simply move them into a folder of your choice (say "blogroll") and use the appropriate roller code to update the sidebar.

Wicked or cool, this is just my way of organizing feeds, should you have a better way to suggest, do let me know in the comments :)

Technorati Tags: google-reader,organize,lifehacking,subscription,feed