Lots of people extol the benefits of reading RSS feeds instead of visiting the sites in question. While this may work for websites where information is scattered all over the place (eg the BBC website), I find that for most of the blogs that I read, the posts are relatively easy to read as godawful web design doesn't get in my way.

Tangentially, examples of godawful web design, courtesy of all the Singaporean Secondary Schoolgirls who've taken over BlogSkins.com: small font sizes, lots of animated gifs, text squeezed into minuscule CSS layers which act as pseudo-frames (except I can't use Firefox's "Open frame in new tab" or "Show only this frame" features to escape the frame) and the use of layers to emulate the effect of having multiple pages on the site - you click on the nav buttons and a new layer displays; especially prevalent in the current blogskins on BlogSkins.com. But then, it's unlikely sites with such godawful design would offer RSS feeds anyway, so the question is moot.

Anyhow, I've flirted with using RSS feeds more than once, but was put off them because not only do you not see the beautiful (ahem) layouts that some people go to great lengths to construct, leaving comments and posting on tagboards requires an extra step (and you can't see how many comments people have left in the first place, or the amusing things trolls have spewed on the tagboards).

Even those using RSS can and have gotten overloaded, probably because it gives you a false sense of complacency, as elia diodati (damn, it's even harder to spell/remember than "Agagooga") and Kevin have found.

The way I deal with all the blogs I want to read is by having a very short blogroll (a list which I'll check when I want to read my usual blogs): 13 sites now, including my LJ friends page. However, I check the blogroll but infrequently; less than 5 times since leaving for US in late May, IIRC. Except for my LJ friends list which I check roughly daily (maybe because it's like RSS, heh). I also have 2 folders with 11 sites in total: "Low Priority - Read when bored" and "Low Priority 2 - Read when very very bored", and I do hit and runs; visiting random blogs not on my blogroll for fun from time to time (in fact, sometimes more often than those on the roll itself). Finally, for sites which are updated once in a blue moon, I have WatchThatPage. So, yes, the list of blogs I read (semi-)regularly in the sidebar is deceptive, since I don't read all of them with the same frequency (shh!).