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

[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.

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

[eleman]

I'd also disagree with RSS being dead. I'm an almost exclusively desktop user, and I like bamboo feed reader a lot. I guess it wouldn't fit your use case though.

[IainB]

After migrating my multifarious lists from Google Reader to Basqux, I haven't seen any difference except for the better, and as for those sites that only give "limited content" - well, in Bazqux, there's a button you can press that fetches the contents using Readability ... and that seems to cater adequately with all but a few stubborn websites.
Bazqux is also pretty good at figuring out the appropriate RSS/Atom/etc. feed for sites that don't seem to declare that they have one. Very few really don't have one, and those few I monitor with Update Scanner, if I want to.

[phitsc]

+1 for Bazqux. And +1 for RSS not being dead.

I have a huge list of web sites I track/read almost exclusively using Bazqux.

[anandcoral]

RSS is alive, yes 

After Google Reader died, I looked around and settled with commafeed. All my feeds work and am happy with the clean and lean interface.

Regards,

Anand

[wraith808]

RSS is alive, yes 

After Google Reader died, I looked around and settled with commafeed. All my feeds work and am happy with the clean and lean interface.

Regards,

Anand

  Thanks for that!  Looks even slimmer than The Old Reader!  But, with depending on donations and what has historically happened (RSS is a lot more resource intensive than people think, so takes more server resources than one would think), I'm not sure about switching over.

[JavaJones]

Ooo, more RSS reader options to investigate! I'm not sure if I'm more excited or dreading the possible desire to switch, haha. But Bazqux sounds promising.

- Oshyan

[phitsc]

Ooo, more RSS reader options to investigate! I'm not sure if I'm more excited or dreading the possible desire to switch, haha. But Bazqux sounds promising.

- Oshyan

Bazqux is also very quick to respond to support inquiries, both technical and administrative. I can only recommend the service

[Deozaan]

After Google Reader died, I just stopped reading my daily feeds.

It was kind of weird at first. But in hindsight I've realized I don't miss them. That said, I've found new ways to waste hours of my mornings catching up on news.

[superboyac]

After Google Reader died, I just stopped reading my daily feeds.

It was kind of weird at first. But in hindsight I've realized I don't miss them. That said, I've found new ways to waste hours of my mornings catching up on news.

same story with me basically.  I bet i could hack together some kind of system using just links.  I mean, that's good enough for me.  An easy way to add links to a list, and then somehow the list monitors whether i've read those links or not.  maybe there's a firefox plugin that could do it...something like this workflow:
--see a link to read later, click something to add to the list
--when you are ready to read, go to the list and click the link.
--once the link is clicked thru the list, the list knows you've read it and stores it as completed.

now that i wrote it out, it looks like something that probably already exists.

[Nod5]

Good thread! Like you, superboyac, I miss the heydays of RSS. I still use RSS when possible but only a local RSS reader app on the desktop PC.

In addition I store .url files with tags locally. Still very useful when researching a topic since you can combine .url files (with tags in filename) with images, pdfs and any other file in a folder (with subfolders). Everything is easy to search with FARR/Everything/SilverSearcher too. But I have no really good system for syncing and using that with Android. Lately I've experimented with using a google docs document as "base" for a project, with pasted url links, notes and a related docs folder with other files.

I also use Pocket since it is so easy and quick to add to the pocket list from both PCs and from Chrome on android phones. But I dislike the pocket app/webapp and tend to use only the pocket addon in firefox in list mode and launch items from there into the browser for reading. I hate having to wait for the Android Pocket app to load and sync slowly because it downloads the content and nudges me to read stuff inside the app.

I'd love to see two things happen:
1. a tool that, like pocket, lets me add stuff very quickly to a synced list from any browser on any platform *and* lets me on any platform browse *only* a minimalist version of that list (page title and url, with word/date filtering) for quick launching into a browser.
2. A minimal websynced RSS reader that likewise *only* stores urls, page titles and dates (no content snippets, no images, etc) lets you star and delete items but apart from that only has one long list of items per feed. It should of course also runs on all platforms.

I think that many attempts at making webapp RSS managers or similar things have failed because they've tried to do too much.

[superboyac]

Good thread! Like you, superboyac, I miss the heydays of RSS. I still use RSS when possible but only a local RSS reader app on the desktop PC.

In addition I store .url files with tags locally. Still very useful when researching a topic since you can combine .url files (with tags in filename) with images, pdfs and any other file in a folder (with subfolders). Everything is easy to search with FARR/Everything/SilverSearcher too. But I have no really good system for syncing and using that with Android. Lately I've experimented with using a google docs document as "base" for a project, with pasted url links, notes and a related docs folder with other files.

I also use Pocket since it is so easy and quick to add to the pocket list from both PCs and from Chrome on android phones. But I dislike the pocket app/webapp and tend to use only the pocket addon in firefox in list mode and launch items from there into the browser for reading. I hate having to wait for the Android Pocket app to load and sync slowly because it downloads the content and nudges me to read stuff inside the app.

I'd love to see two things happen:
1. a tool that, like pocket, lets me add stuff very quickly to a synced list from any browser on any platform *and* lets me on any platform browse *only* a minimalist version of that list (page title and url, with word/date filtering) for quick launching into a browser.
2. A minimal websynced RSS reader that likewise *only* stores urls, page titles and dates (content snippets, no images, etc) lets you star and delete items but apart from that only has one long list of items per feed. It should of course also runs on all platforms.

I think that many attempts at making webapp RSS managers or similar things have failed because they've tried to do too much.

Nice, yes, you seem to have more experiences than i do.  I think the problem with RSS is simply the content control is with each site, so the rss software can only do so much.  I always feel i'm clicking far too much whenever i do anything with rss.  click the article, click to expand, click to launch in browser, click to close browser, click to go back, click click click.  it's like 3x too many clicks for everything.

forget rss.  your 2 suggestions are pretty good.  just a list of links and some cool features to manage them.  maybe linkman can do something.

[superboyac]

Here's a stupid simple hack using linkman as an option...
I can easily create a bookmark for linkman with a click.
in linkman, it just gets stored in a big list.  It can be sorted by "launch count".  So if you reverse sort it where the lowest counts are at the top, that means the ones on top are the ones you haven't visited yet.  So it's kind of a self-sorting list.  If you click to read an article, it's count increases and goes to the bottom.  It's doable.

[Nod5]

I always feel i'm clicking far too much whenever i do anything with rss.  click the article, click to expand, click to launch in browser, click to close browser, click to go back, click click click.  it's like 3x too many clicks for everything.

Yeah, very true. Though on the desktop I try to streamline the RSS use like so: quickly browse through a bunch of feeds in one go, checking only titles lines (not content preview) and doubleclicking (I use RSSOwl) anything interesting to load it in an external browser in the background. Then close the RSS reader and starting reading in browser. There's still a fair number of clicks involved but not too much and in a way the dislike for clicking helps me be picky on what to read - good since the biggest trouble with RSS is that there is too darn much interesting stuff to read flowing in every day

[app103]

I stopped reading RSS feeds for awhile, once I started following bloggers on Friendfeed. But with the Friendfeed shutdown earlier this year, I have gone back to using Newzie.

But rather than using the main window with the built in browser (like I used to use), I have switched to using the Today window, with just the headlines and short excerpt on hover. Click the headline and it open the page in my default browser.  It allows me to get through the feeds, reading anything that catches my eye, much quicker.

[kwacky1]

I still use RSS 

I run ttrss on my own web server 

[jojo99]

RSS is far from dead.  I depend on Inoreader (www.inoreader.com), which looks exactly like the old Google Reader + added a lot more functionality.  It runs on Windows, Android & at least IOS.

I was told I was in the top 5% of Pocket users a few months back! [lol].  I use Pocket to save stuff from the news sites I read on Android.

On Windows I don't need Pocket because I save stuff I want to read as browser tabs or on Clipmate (the best clipboard maintenance and control app) that unfortunately hasn't been updated by the author in years, although it seems he is still willing to take payment for the app.

[dr_andus]

RSS is far from dead.  I depend on Inoreader (www.inoreader.com), which looks exactly like the old Google Reader + added a lot more functionality.

+1 for InoReader as Google Reader replacement.

[jity2]

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.

Hi,

I have always tried to get my rss feeds into emails. You can get full rss contents with http://fivefilters.org/content-only/. They also have an rss feed creator for websites that have no rss feeds.
I also use Website Watcher (their rss support has improved recently - you can get an email with only titles of the feed...etc. I read that the next update will support for regex filtering of rss feeds) and ifft (now you can get daily or weekly emails. Alas they replace the original urls with theirs. So if they disappear in the future you may not have access to the original urls. Fingers crossed!).

See ya