There are several tools out there for combining your RSS feeds and I just happened to try Feedblendr tonight. There was no registration necessary and you simply type in a title for your new feed and then enter URLs for the feeds you want to combine and presto – you have a new feed that you can enter into your reader and it will now display the headers for articles of all the feeds you combined. Tonight I created one called the Dynamic Trio – I entered the links for the blogs of Wes Fryer, David Warlick, and Miguel Guhlin and ended up with one feed that displayed all three of their headers. You also have the option to display it as a webpage and read it right then. It was fun to play with and hopefully will be another tool in my battle to tame the wild blog bloat. I want to read more than I have time for and I want to organize but at the same time I don’t want to miss anything. I’m planning to create a few more tonight and do a little consolidating.

This is part of my resolution to pare down, down size, organize, and clean out. Maybe it’s spring, maybe it’s the growing pile of things I want to get to but can’t and they keep calling to me and distracting me. I recently started making notes on colored index cards. I bought myself an accordian file folder sized for the cards with tabbed dividers and a card file box. The folder is fairly flat and goes with me in my laptop case and as it gets full I transfer cards to the file box. I have a card in the front of the folder and one in the front of the box with the color coding legend and I am slowly trying to shrink the piles of printouts of articles I have saved because of some bit of information or ideas I knew I would want to refer back to by transferring the information to my cards and filing it. I keep a supply of blank cards in the front of the folder and extras to replenish my supply in the file box. The price is reasonable and for a terminal note taker like myself it gives me a place to keep and find all those bits and pieces of information. Now I have mentioned this system in my blog for the whole world to see, I’m hoping it will keep me motivated. Besides, if I get more organized I will have more time to read all those newly combined feeds!
Now if I could just come up with a better system for my closet…..