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How are we all getting by with our reading organization/tracking post-RSS?

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superboyac:
Ever since the death of RSS a couple years ago, I haven't ever recovered.  (I know it's not really dead, but I've labeled the years after 2013 as the post-RSS era).
How are you guys keeping track of what you read?  I was never a big fan of rss anyway.  I've tried website-watcher, and things like that.  I like reddit as a place to collect things to read that are interesting to others, but I don't have any way to organize my own stuff...all the blogs, podcasts, etc. that i follow.  Anyone using any interesting software or tools for it?

Don't you just want to have a list of commonly visited sites, and then keep track of which articles/links you haven't read yet.  Maybe the ability to queue it in some fashion, so you can have a list of things to read later.  I'm currently not doing anything fancy anymore, just visiting the sites in the browser basically manually.

This idea is interesting:
Hey everyone.

I wanted to share something that I have been doing and that is keeping me productive but still "in-the-know" on my favorite blogs and websites.

I use a site called IFTTT[1] .com (If This Then That, it allows you to setup a type of real life loop that checks for something, and does something if that happens.) to do most of the work for me.

With IFTTT I have setup a recipe for each site that I follow. It checks the RSS feed of that site, and if it is updated, it posts the article to my Pocket[2] reader account.

For sites that have a TON of content, and I don't necessarily read all of it, I have an IFTTT recipe setup so that if I start something in google reader, it sends it to pocket.

Every morning, I scan the headlines in Google Reader, and if something catches my attention I star it. All other websites and blogs that I follow and want to read are automatically put into Pocket.

Now, whenever I have some down time and I want to read articles that interest me. Rather than taking my 10 minute break to slog through some RSS feeds, I just go to pocket and everything is of interest and ready to be read.

Additionally, you can setup IFTTT to automatically add a video that you have marked as "Watch Later" on YouTube into Pocket. So when I want to watch videos, rather than getting distracted by kittens for 30 minutes, I go to Pocket and watch exactly what I need to.

I wanted to share this with you all, in case you hadn't heard of either Pocket[3] or IFTTT[4] . Hopefully you will find it as awesome as I have.

--- End quote ---
from:
https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/13bao0/how_to_read_a_lot_of_websites_while_being/

JavaJones:
That sounds like a nice workflow with Pocket, a tool I've been meaning to try to use (I have the extension setup in my browser but never use it, heh).

That being said I really *don't* see a lot of advantage in that setup except for one thing, which is a limitation of many RSS feeds, and maybe in some ways of the RSS format itself (or at least how it is commonly used): limited content length. Many RSS feeds only give you a snippet of the full content, or content differently formatted than the main website. In these cases having a Pocket version of the (presumably) full content is definitely ideal.

Anyway, I *do* still use RSS quite heavily. I use Feedly, which finally gave me a view close enough to the old Google Reader that I am happy with it, at least on desktop web. I tried the Digg reader and others, but none really "did it" for me. Feedly finally got there and I've stuck with it since, at least a year now (I have a G+ post on my experiments somewhere in my feed history, I can dig it up if anyone is for some reason curious about the details). On mobile (Android) I use GReader free, works great. And honestly I find I can pretty much use it just as that quote describes above, except I do filtering/selection of interesting content somewhat concurrently with reading. I can always save articles for later reading if desired, star them, etc. in my reader app. But I tend to read as I go, for the most part. Works well for me.

So for me RSS is not dead, and I hope it doesn't get killed. Given that the workflow quoted above relies on RSS as the content starting point, and I'm not aware of any other real replacement for it for getting updates from general websites, I don't think then that RSS is going anywhere any time soon. Hopefully... Maybe it's just a matter of finding the right reading tools/methods for you?

- Oshyan

wraith808:
I still use RSS and The Old Reader

superboyac:
JJ, the limited content length...it's the one thing that i could never get past with rss.  It just bugs me way too much, and showing full articles is dependent on the provider.  I'm going to check out that workflow in the first post.  My feeling is that there is no sophisticated reader for this type of thing yet, and maybe there never will be due to how the whole thing works.  I don't think we'll ever get to the point anytime soon where you can use a software to read these articles and have the articles appear the way they naturally do on the actual websites.  So maybe what I'll try with Pocket or something is just to keep track of the links i visit.  instead of a nice rss feed, just list of links i've visited or plan to visit.  something like that.

JavaJones:
If you use Pocket to keep track of links like that, it's actually *less* functional than RSS IMO, which at least gives you a preview of the content so you can decide what to read and when. The limited content is a choice by the content provider, in most cases, and perhaps you can guess why it's done. It's generally not a technical limitation (although there are *some* limitations in Feedly itself -and other feed readers - that make certain content like embedded videos only work in limited cases). It's the fact that the Internet is largely powered by advertising, and it's harder to do ads well through RSS. Most content providers don't want you being able to read the entirety of their content off of their own site as you won't see their ads. So until that motivation changes, I think *any* "content aggregator" solution will be necessarily limited by the provider's intentions/desires.

- Oshyan

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