Back in August, I took part in Blaugust along with a large community of bloggers. The idea is to write every day during the month of August. It was wonderful.

Perhaps the best part of that experience wasn’t the writing, but the discovery of so many new blogs to read. I wrote about the upsides and downsides of that here. At that point I had over 4000 unread blog posts to read. Obviously since then, many (many) more have been added to that list. After all, just because blaugust is over, doesn’t mean people stopped blogging.

But, I’m proud to say as of this evening, I’ve finally zeroed out my unread blog category in FreshRSS. It took 6 months, but I did it. Did I read every blog post there? No, but I read every single title and probably about 80% of the posts themselves. Some of the posts I gave a miss were just from bloggers that blog about things I care little about. I cleared those out of the feed and moved on.

I have to say, I’m quite happy with this accomplishment. It would have been quite easy to just hit the “Mark All as Read” button and start fresh. But I subscribed to these blogs, the least I could do is read the titles before deciding whether or not to can the posts. Do I regret subscribing to so many blogs at once? No, not really. I’ve found so many new blog friends through this experience, bloggers who now write some of my favorite content. Maybe I’m not interested in everything everyone in my RSS client writes, but a lot of it I am, and it fascinates me to no end. RSS often gives me a break from whatever book or fanfiction I’m reading, and it’s real unlike the other stuff I read. It keeps me grounded in reality, even if I still give the national news a complete miss.

All this makes me think RSS may be the best way to get news. I’ve begun thinking about a way that I can find a trusted news source that will offer a full RSS feed so that I can avoid the horribleness of websites. I don’t know if anything like that exists, but it would be intersting. I’d much perfer my news to come that way.

The only other thought I have about this is that I’m going to feel like I have little to read now that there aren’t 100s of unread blog posts in my feed. I’ll have some new ones tomorrow, but I’ll get through those very fast. When they’re gone, I will no longer have that backlog to fall back on when I need something to read. I may be a little lost without it. Maybe I’ll have to find more blogs.