News via RSS
For the last four years, I’ve read articles through a feed reader app and it’s a wonderful experience. Instead of bookmarking ten different websites and then opening up each one to find interesting articles that I may want to read, I get all of the news articles delivered directly to me in a unified way so I can choose what information to consume. Many websites have a RSS feed that you can save to a feed reader and the reader will periodically pull down new articles for you to view. In most cases, you’ll still have to go to the news site to read the article, but the reader will make it easy for you to choose what you want to read.
Here are a few benefits to ingesting news this way:
- Quickly scroll through titles uniformly to find interesting articles instead of navigating every new site differently
- No advertisements on the sides of pages when looking through article titles
- Easily favorite news articles to make it easy to reference them later on
There are plenty of apps to choose from, but the two I decided on were:
- The Old Reader for Web - $25 annually for premium, there is also a free version available
- Reeder 3 for iOS - $4.99 one-time (they are now on v5, but I’m still fine on v3)
Image of The Old Reader (web):
Image of Reeder 3 (iOS):
The apps work together - The Old Reader app is where my feed information is stored like sites I’ve subscribed to and items I’ve favorited while the Reeder app syncs and pulls down articles I haven’t read yet. The Reeder app also allows me to favorite sites which syncs back to The Old Reader.
You don’t need to pay for apps like I did, there are free alternatives out there that will work just fine. I pay for the apps to get features like syncing across devices and full text search. I’m also happy to support the developers because I use the apps frequently and they save me a lot a time which easily pays for itself. I appreciate an efficient workflow.
A few of the sites I subscribe to are: