I use Google Reader to provide the articles from my favourite sites as a ‘River of News’ so that I can keep up with the news I want to read in more efficient manner than keeping a list of bookmarks to surf through. Lately, I’ve become deluged with posts and have struggled to keep up with it all in the limited time I get for such purposes. As my feed list approches triple-figures, I’ve had to adapt the way I read my feeds. Here are the five ways I manage my feeds to be as efficient as possible - bear in mind that they’re predominantly Google Reader-based.

1. Star Items

For items that you’re likely to want to refer back to in the future, use Google Reader’s star feature to mark a post as important. This may seem obvious, but it’s the simplest way to start structuring your favourite items for easy reference

2. Tag Items

Another probably obvious one, but taking the time to add a few tags (or ‘labels’ as Google calls them) to each post you’re may want to refer to later, but don’t necessarily warrant a star can save you time in the future.

3. Use the del.icio.us plugin for firefox

Use the del.icio.us plugin to right-click on the headline of an item and bookmark it along with tags, for future reference. Also see #5

4. Collapse your items

In a rush? Use the ‘List View’ rather than the ‘Expanded view’ to quickly skim the titles of items and pick the ones you think really matter to you at this precise moment.

5. The killer tag: ‘toread’

Using the Google Reader tagging system, or in conjunction with del.icio.us, tag an item as ‘toread’ when you know you really want to read an article, but just don’t have the time at the moment - this is more efficient than marking an item as unread, or bunching it in with the starred items etc because you can remove the ‘toread’ tag when you’re done but keep all your other tags for categorisation purposes. Bonus tip: searching del.icio.us for items tagged as ‘toread’ can sometimes provide some interesting results if you’re bored - consider it a StumbleUpon without the toolbar!

These tips could probably be expanded upon - an example would be to add more ‘toxxxx’ tags - todo,tobuy etc etc.

I’ve never felt the need to write a book recommendation before, either because existing reviews already convey my opinion in a better way than I ever could, or that I don’t feel confident enough in my knowledge of the subject matter to express an informed opinion.

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird, however is an exception to the rule. The reason I feel confident enough to write about it is that it was written for me. Yes, despite Sitepoint’s prominent and (understandably) gleeful proclamation of “10,000 copies sold (in the first month!)” on the book’s page this book was written for me. It’s a design book, for people who code and know nothing about design, i.e. me.

So far I’m about half way through the book, having just read the chapter on colour (which in my opinion justifies the cost of the book in itself) and I can’t put it down. I suspect I’ll read the second half in a single sitting, it’s that good.

The only bad thing I can say about the book is that it makes me want to redesign this site - again. Even though I recently spent a considerable amount of time jerry-rigging the excellent templated design it’s currently using (go ahead, look in the footer - full disclosure!) into my website system.

If like me you’re a coder who wields less artistic talent in your whole body than most people have in their thumbnail, then this is the book for you. Go and buy it, now. Oh, and visit the author’s website too. And grab his RSS feed while you’re there