- **By**: [[I am BARRY HESS]] - **Date Published**: 2025-02-03 - **Date Read**: 2025-04-02T18:45:45+01:00 - [**Read Original**](https://bjhess.com/posts/mark-all-read) - **Tags**: **Note:** Below is the text from an online article – none of the writing is by me. In a recent post I mentioned that RSS feeds are a [FOMO machine](https://bjhess.com/posts/fomo-machines) for me. Let me share more than you care to know about how my mind works… In the 2000s I subscribed to a number of magazines, and my best self would peruse them cover-to-cover I read every article and noted down every discovery. What *really* happened with those magazines, though, is they stacked up in a corner of my office; a pile of guilt growing day-by-day. I sometimes miss the magazine life, but I have to admit it felt good when the monthly magazines slowed down to a trickle of maybe one per month. Now that trickle is gone and I often wonder if I should subscribe to just one magazine. That wouldn’t be bad, would it? Just one? Fast forward to today and RSS feeds have supplanted magazines as a major guilt-pile in my life. I don’t feel like I subscribe to that many feeds, but here I am with 700+ unread articles/posts/etc. That’s a bit much, yeah? I want to get to a place where I can confidently click *Mark All Read* every week. How do I plan to do that? ### Bookmarks Some categories of feeds would really be better as bookmarks. I’m thinking that any cooking, cocktail, or woodworking feed should be made into a bookmark. These sorts of “recipe” sites are ones I should visit when I want to find something to make rather than being inundated with the latest recipe from all the places. There’s a lot of good stuff out there! I don’t need to see it all every day forever. So I made a [Commonplace: Hobby Bookmarks](https://bjhess.com/pages/commonplace/hobby-bookmarks) page and now I’m going to see if this enables me to let the stream pass by and let the *Mark All Read* to do its business. ### Stars I’m going to skim through my unread posts and star those that seem really “can’t miss”-able. My feed reader, [Unread](https://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/unread/), will surface starred items even if they’re marked read, so this allows me to *Mark All Read* without losing track of 10-20 starred items. In my weekly processing I will probably make use of starring from time to time, but I’m going to be watching out to see if this just creates a new “read it later”-style pile of unnecessary guilt for me. ### Responding If a post in my feed reader makes me want to respond by linking to it, blogging about it, or emailing the author, I’m going to have a low tolerance for “I’ve starred it and I’ll do that some day.” For now I’ll continue to tell myself, “You should respond to that!” But when I inevitably don’t get to it,I’m going to un-star that thing. ### Mark All Read So every week I’m going to *Mark All Read*. Easy, right? I think I’m going to have trouble with the “all” part of that phrase. What I really want is to *Mark All Posts Published a Week or More Ago Read*. So the multi-step process probably will be: 1. Look through starred posts and be honest about my plans to read them, un-starring aggressively 2. Skim all unread posts and star anything that might be of interest 3. *Mark All Read*