Because tonight I'm cleaning out my feed reader

Granted it's not every day I use an Eminem song lyric as the inspiration for one of my vintage blog posts, but as they say, when the shoe fits... :)

On to the point of this post, and that is the fact that even if we're still contending with the tail end of winter, I've already been bitten by the spring cleaning bug and the first thing that I decided to invest a little elbow grease in was tidying up my feed burner.

You see, I'm something of a collector. I'm the perpetual Girl Guide who always has so many links (to blogs and sites I find interesting) in the wings that I'm prepared to find instant inspiration for just about any subject.

My eclectic passion for everything from vintage dresses to bento lunches, scrapbooking to photography means that after three years of using the same reader, I'd subscribed to a staggering 3,500+ feeds. Of course, I don't read or actively follow all of the sites that those feeds belong to (doing so would take considerably more hours than there are in the day - heck, perhaps in the whole year!), but there is a select handful that I love - and do try to follow as best I can.

The problem is, the plethora of other links (cool as they are - and/or were when I first discovered them and felt their feed worthy of following) are getting in the way of my ability to focus on those sites that I actually have a vested interest in. Equally distracting is that fact that for some time now my (desktop) feed reader has been crashing nine times out of ten when I try to update it, as it just doesn't seem to be able to cope with the volume of new feeds it's being asked to handle.

It's unlikely that this problem was going to remedy itself, which means it was time for me to step in and take action. I've been wanting to whittle down my feed list for quite a while now, and since there's no time like the present, I decided that tonight it was high time I rolled up my sleeves and set to work. The new streamlined list of feeds (which ideally I'd like to keep well below the 500 blog/website mark) will, I very much hope, allow me to better follow my favourite sites - those blogs and corners of the interwebs that continually inspire me, make me smile, add an extra dose of zingy colour to my world, and many of which which belong souls I consider to be online friends.

Naturally, the nucleus of my significantly lighted feed load will be comprised of vintage related blogs. Those are the sites that I cannot get enough of, which I delight at reading, and absolutely adore following. It's important to me to stay abreast of what's going on with my fellow vintage bloggers, and I couldn't imagine not devoting the bulk of my new list of blog feeds that follow to sites that are delightfully centered around old school topics.

I generally quite like cleaning and organizing, and as I work my way through the process of tidying up my feeds tonight, I feel a familiar sense of lightness that is so redolent of the sense I often get after giving the house a good once over or tackling a organizational task that really needed to be done.

{Cheerful vintage homemaker photo via Pure Style Home.}

It can be all too easy to let your the list of blog feeds that you follow spiral out of control, and before you know it you've got hundreds or thousands of feeds and no possible way to keep an eye on all of them. As time passes one's interests can change, which - paired with the fact that naturally enough some sites will always cease to operate each year - means that a blog that caught your eye two years ago may no longer be relevant to your tastes or passions now.

There's unequivocally nothing wrong with streamlining your feed list, and honestly it's something we should all do from time to time (if only to prune out any dead links). If you haven't tided your feed reader (be it desktop or online based) lately, I highly recommend joining me in doing so.

I love knowing that by this time tomorrow, I'll have an easy-to-sort-through, concise, wonderful list of sites that really matter to me to follow and use as major source of vintage and creative inspiration throughout the rest of 2011 and well beyond.