In this article I’ll share several different ways with you that will allow you to keep up with the RSS Feeds you subscribed to.

Choose the Right Feed Reader

One of the most important tools you need in order to keep track of your feeds is your feed reader. There are literally thousands of different feed reading applications you can choose from, but you’ll need to figure out on your own which one suits your needs the best. One feature I highly recommend is some sort of folder, label or tag system (More on this later).

Here are some recommendations:

Online Feed Readers

Google Reader

One of the most popular feed readers and also the feed reader of my choice. Google Reader has a multitude of useful features including a useful folder and labeling system, seamless integration with other Google services and even the option to subscribe to web pages without RSS Feed.

Bloglines

Another famous feed reader that offers drag and drop feed management, folder functionality, a custom start page, mobile access and many other useful features.

FeedShow

Even though FeedShow is less known it isn’t inferior to the previous two feed readers. It offers similar features, such as a folder functionality, local storage of feed items, instant conversion into pdf- and print-ready files.

Browser Extensions

Sage (Firefox only)

Sage is a Firefox addon that integrates seamlessly with Firefox’s native bookmarking system, enables feed discovery and allows you to apply custom stylesheets. It is furthermore available in several languages and let’s you import and export feed lists (OPML).

Feedly

Feedly is a browser extension currently available for Firefox and Chrome as well as a Safari-compatible version will be released soon. Feedly allows you to create your own custom start page based on your feeds (it integrates with Google Reader), Twitter account and other web services such as YouTube, Amazon and Delicious.

Rss Ticker (Firefox only)

Another Firefox addon that allows you to quickly display your feeds and scroll their entries across your screen while you surf. It’s perfect for staying informed without having to actively browse entries in an RSS reader.

Desktop Feed Readers

Newzie

Newzie is a great desktop feed aggregator for Windows. It comes with a true multitude of features such as the combination of several feeds into one bulk feed, updates of web sites without traditional feeds and colored feed titles based on publishing date.

RSS Bandit

RSS Bandit has been around for quite some time now, but offers nonetheless some state of the art features. You can synchronize your feeds with Google Reader, download and manage Podcasts and have several storage options.

NetNewsWire

This desktop feed reader is a great addition for every Mac. It seamlessly integrates with many native Mac applications like iTunes or Twitterific to handle different form of data like Podcasts as well as it syncs with Google Reader.

Review Your Subscriptions Regularly

Over the years I subscribed to more and more new RSS-Feeds without ever sorting old ones out. Sometimes you or the respective blog shifts its interests/focus or you subscribed to a blog that simply isn’t publishing good content on a regular basis. After some time this resulted in a lot of items in my feed reader I wasn’t interested in. It is essential that you review all your subscriptions on a semi-regular basis (every 3 months or so) and sort out dead feeds (even though they’re not really spamming your feed reader, there is no reason for keeping them) and feeds you aren’t interested in anymore.

Subscribe to Category Feeds instead of Full Feeds

There are more and more blogs that offer category-specific feeds. If you decide to subscribe to a category feed (or several) you get only updates that are published under the category you subscribed to. This is perfect for blogs with a wide variety of topics – you can subscribe only to the categories that really interest you and your feed reader won’t be flooded with entries that are irrelevant to you.

Organize Them with Folders/Labels/Tags

Because I’m using Google Reader I’m talking based on my experiences with exactly that reader, but when choosing your reader you should make sure that he features some sort of folder, tag or label system that allows you to organize your different feeds. One way to approach this is to assign them based on content type, but that might not be the best solution, especially if you’re subscribed to blogs that cover a wide range of topics (e.g. Abduzeedo, Design Informer and even DesignLovr). I recommend you to sort them after priority. Put all your must-reads in one folder (or label/tag), blogs that output a lot of average content in another one, etc.
This allows you to prioritize easily when you don’t have much time.

Subscribe with Different Feed Readers

Not everybody will like this method, but you could also consider to subscribe to different feeds with different feed readers. This would allow you to keep as an example personal and professional feeds completely separated. By subscribing to your most important feeds with one feed reader (RSS Ticker as an example) and to less important ones with another you could also take the priority based labeling of your feeds one step further.

Use Twitter Instead of RSS

I’m sure there are certain blogs that only occasionally publish content that is of interest for you. If you don’t want to crowd your feed reader with unnecessary feeds consider simply following those blogs on Twitter. Depending on how closely you monitor your Twitter activity you won’t miss much and eventually even get additional links to other interesting reads.

Set Feed Reading Time Aside

The best way to keep up with your feeds is to set yourself some time aside, either daily or weekly. By taking everyday half an hour to an hour you’ll definitely be able to read several items in your feed. You could even set this time in the middle of your working day – it will be a welcome interruption of your regular work.

By using only some of the methods I presented above you can already drastically improve the way you organize and read your feeds and it will ultimately help you to save time without missing any important updates and news. Why don’t you leave a comment if you have any tips, feed readers or experiences you would like to share.

The creators of these helpful and by now nearly essential applications often work for free and make none or little money, if not even losses.

The question is how we, the persons that profit the most from open source projects, can help, contribute and support the numerous and free applications, scripts and programs and their creators, so that they can further improve, evolve and do as well in the future as good of a job as they do now.

Giving Feedback

One of the simplest ways to help any product (free or not) is to give feedback, report bugs and errors and suggest things that could be improved in the future.
At the same time keep in mind that the responsible people work on their projects in their free time and without payment; be gentle and polite, provide constructive critique and don’t expect that problems are solved over night (or maybe at all).

If you didn’t pay for the lightbox script you are using, you can’t expect the programmer to make it work in IE6 just because you want it to.

Solutions are nevertheless often found surprisingly quick. Also don’t forget to check documentations, discussion boards and forums related to the application you use for problems similar to yours; there is no point in reporting a bug for the fiftieth time.

Contribute yourself

Directly related to my first suggestion is the following one: If you find a bug or miss a certain function and you are savvy in the related coding language fix it yourself and share your solution with the original creator.

Fixing bugs and adding functions is hereby just the beginning, you can also generally improve the code (make it smaller, faster, better), create your own styling, built it on another framework (MooTools instead of jQuery) and so on.

I’m sure the authors of the original will be thankful for every improvement you come up with. Eventually the grateful creator will even mention and link to you (who says no to some free traffic).

Because most of the applications and scripts we’re talking about in this article are open source you could theoretically republish them yourself, but how much sense does that really make as long as you don’t make any major changes.

Giving Credit

A somewhat different method, but after my opinion the absolute minimum you can and should do is to mention and link to the applications and scripts you used on a web site.

Even a little footnote at the bottom of your page is worth something and an easy way to say “Thank you”.
Like this you’re not only generating some traffic for the authors of the application, but your visitors can also easily find out what techniques you used on your web page.

Especially if you are using a lot of free applications and scripts (as an example free Word press plugins on your blog) you might consider creating a whole “credits” page.

Spread the word

Another similar way is to recommend or report on open source projects (it doesn’t even matter whether or not you actually use them).

You can do this very easily with the help of Twitter or other social networking (Facebook) and bookmarking services(digg) or via mail and instant messengers (directly recommend to your co-workers and colleagues). The best way is naturally to dedicate a post to the product or create a list of open source projects you enjoy on your blog, in case you have one.

Donate

The last and maybe most appreciated way to help an open source project is donating.

I know that there are a lot of people that won’t be able to afford donating and no one is going to be mad if you just don’t have the cash to do so (maybe you are a design student or just started your own business, etc.), but if you are a successful professional (or enterprise) and are financially well situated then you should definitely consider this.

I also know that there are already a lot of payments that need to be made, including commercial licenses for applications and software, stock resources or font licenses, but a small donation can already make a big difference.

One thing you could consider is to give a certain percentage of your payment for a project to the platform you built it on. You could as example give $20 to wordpress.org if you used Wordpress to built a $2000 web site for a customer; one percent doesn’t seem like too big of a sacrifice.
It is also clear that you can’t give a percentage of your payment to every little plug-in and script you use, but the ones you use on a regular basis or prove to be especially useful you should also support with a small donation (the sky is the limit, but everything from $5 upwards is just fine).

Most open source projects also list donators and their good deeds.

Conclusion

Although the focus of this post was definitely on free and open source applications and scripts, it doesn’t mean that these principles can’t be applied to other free services and goods you enjoy.

No one stops you from supporting your favorite blog, free stock image sites, free fonts or other resources, online tools or applications or open source software.

Most of the above principles can as well be used to support these free goods and their creators; often there are even more possibilities. I’m sure that your favorite web design blog or forum are glad if you participate in discussions and give feedback or submit their posts to different sites (digg, twitter, designbump, etc.).

We receive a lot of the tools and resources that help us to do a better job for free and take them for granted, but we tend to forget that someone actually made the effort and invested his time and energy and that is, after all, not as normal and self-evident as we might think.