WOT?
There’s too much news to read but I seem to be missing important news articles. How can become more efficient in the way that I keep up with what’s happening around me?
SUMMARY
A newsreader is a very specialized type of software designed to display news articles from the sources you select and hides from view the articles you’ve read. Feedly is a great newsreader and is all you will need to keep up with the news.
WHY?
There’s a lot of information on the Internet and everybody is fighting for your attention. A good newsreader such as Feedly makes it possible to keep up with the news and make it manageable.
A typical user may go to websites such as Google News or Yahoo News to find out what’s going on. These sites do a great job of combining news from multiple sources and presenting it to you in an organized way. After reading an article on these sites however, the read articles continue to be displayed making it difficult to know what you’ve already read and what new headlines are popping up. Unlike email, there’s no way to mark an article as having been read. It’s also difficult to tag specific articles that interest you for later viewing. Isn’t there a better way of handling this?
That’s exactly what makes a newsreader such as Feedly so great. After reading an article, it’s marked as read and hidden from view (if you wish). In addition, you can also choose to save the article for later viewing or you can share it on a social media site. As you read (or skip) more and more articles those articles are marked as read and you won’t see them again, unless you want to.
We all use multiple devices (PC’s, tablets, phones) and we use all of them all, sometimes doing similar tasks such as read mail, read the news and post to social media sites. With Feedly, articles read at home on your PC are marked as read and those articles won’t show up later in the afternoon when checking the news from your phone. Feedly’s cloud sync ensures that you can pick up exactly where you left off, no matter which device you decide to use.
Get Feedly
To get started, go to the Feedly website and create a free account. Feedly can make suggestions for sites to subscribe to, or you can browse for them yourself.
In addition to using Feedly’s extensive database to find RSS feeds, you can also use Google. For instance, do a Google search for “cnn rss” (without the quotes). The first hit will be a list of CNN RSS feeds that you can add to Feedly. As you add more feeds, you can organize them by group. For instance, I have an Android Category made up of various sites such as Engadget, The Verge, Gizmodo, etc. Although I can read news from each of these sites one at a time, I typically prefer a combined view by reading the “Android” category directly. This includes all articles, sorted by date into one long feed.
Feeds can contain all sorts of information. For instance, since I live in California, I want to have access to a list of recent earthquakes in case I happen to feel one. By viewing the feed, I was surprised to find out how often they occur.
Using Feedly
On a typical day, I keep up with industry news. For me it’s the computer field, but for you, it may be something else. Keeping up with headlines and reading the articles that catch your eye ensures that you’re up to date with the latest news happening around you. Sometimes you may not be ready to read an article or the article is too long to read in the free time you have. Feedly lets you save articles to read later, either within its own program, or to other sites such as Pocket.com. You can then view only the articles you’ve saved.
You can also share articles right from within Feedly using the standard Android share dialog. This is great for sharing articles with friends via email or text, to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. You can also post the article to your blog or even save it to online storage sites such as Box, Dropbox or Google Drive. My personal favorite shares however are to my to TickTick (my do list) and to add videos in the article to my Plex queue. I probably share to Plex the most.
Feed Ideas
In additional to geeky computer news, I also have other types of useful feeds such as:
- My kid’s school
- Local town news
- FDA Recalls/Safety Alerts
- Recent earthquakes
- Podcast listing
You will be surprised at just how many RSS feeds are out there. Once you start using news readers, you may get hooked just like I did.