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Posts tagged: rss

Digital Duplication

admin | September 29, 2008

I have become aware over the last few days that I have a lot of digital duplication going on.

I use Outlook 2007 to read my RSS feeds and I use a little Twitter application called OutTwit to corral together my friends Tweets from Twitter.

and

The duplication is coming from reading a websites RSS feeds and then also adding their Twitter feed – 99% of the time the two are exact duplicates of each other.

There are also may websites that are simply using the popularity of Twitter to draw more people into reading their website by using an app called Twitter Feed. This takes an RSS feed and sends tweets to Twitter each time the RSS feed updates with a new item.

So as you can see – if you read a sites RSS feed and happen to follow their tweets then your going to be seeing double!

Now I am not saying this is a major problem and it is easy enough to solve – which I finally did the other day. I compared my RSS feeds to my Twitter friends and removed the RSS feed from my Outlook.

So why remove the RSS feed and not the Twitter account? Easy – they are more likely to tweet an isolated comment in and between the stories on their RSS feed instead of post a story for their 140 character comment on their site and subsequently to their RSS feed and then subsequently again to their Twitter trail.

This happened to me once before as well – back during my transition from email based newsletters to RSS feeds. I wonder what the next transition point will be and what technologies will be crossing paths with each other?

So, how do you deal with digital duplication?

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Tags: digital dupliclation, feeds, rss, rss feeds, twitter, twitter feed

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Deleting IE7 RSS Feeds in Bulk

admin | April 29, 2008

I recently went and removed 100% of the feeds I was subscribed to in Outlook 2007 - over 50 of them - and yes I know that is small compared to some. Information Overflow was in full force and I needed to create some space to refocus a few different things I do.

I found removing all of my RSS feeds in Outlook is very easy:

In the above dialog, which you reach by clicking on the Tools>Account Settings>RSS Feeds Tab, you can select just one feed or multiple feeds - hit the Remove button and they are gone. Simple, straight forward and quick.

Now it is well known out there on the Internet and that the Windows Common Feeds introduced with Windows Vista and IE7 list can be accessed by any application that is written to do so - such as Outlook 2007 does. If I subscribe to an RSS feed while browsing the Internet it will also be accessible in Outlook 2007 the next time I start it up. Nice and convenient. It was this feature in fact kept me from moving from IE7 to Safari - I could not add RSS feeds through Safari into the Common Feeds List - bummer by the way because Safari is much faster than IE7.

OK - back to the story of this post - so when you remove a feed from Outlook 2007 it DOES NOT remove it from the Windows Common Feed list - just from Outlook 2007. Seems to be a bit of a disconnect as they will sync in one direction - IE7 to Outlook 2007 - but not Outlook 2007 to IE7 - such as in the case of a removal in Outlook 2007.

So if I went to Google an answer to this issue - how do I mass remove/delete/unsubscribe from RSS feeds via IE7? The answer was not forthcoming. I even tried to search and find where the Windows Common Feeds data is kept on a Windows Vista computer and had no luck there. So my next step was to experiment and search for myself. It actually took less time then a Google search to find this directory of feeds.

First thing I did was allow hidden files to be - well - unhidden:

I then browsed to the following directory

C:\Users\User Name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Feeds\ which contained several files (one for each subscribed RSS feed and a Feeds DataBase file.

With all instances of IE7 closed I simply selected all of the files in this directory and hit the delete button - after a brief confirmation:

They were all gone!

After you get rid of them your feed list in IE7 will look nice and clean:

So after experiencing some frustration with searching the Internet for how to do this I hope you find this blog post via your favorite search engine and save a few minutes in the process of cleaning up your Windows Common Feed list.