The One With The Reader: continued

July 21, 2016 ☼ article

A few weeks ago I learned about Inoreader and it completely transformed my RSS-reading and my overall social media consumption. It almost feels like going back to the ‘old days’, but in a good way.

For many years reading my RSS feed had been an important part of my daily routine. I spent a lot of time in Google Reader, yet, when it closed I didn’t moan that much. It was sad to see it go, but I started to use different services and got over it. I ran through a couple, and eventually stuck more or less with Feedly. It didn’t make me happy but it worked.

I can’t really pinpoint a reason why, but even though I moved my subscriptions from one service to the other and then over to Feedly, reading my feeds somehow had lost it’s mojo. Ultimately I increasingly used a combination of Twitter and Flipboard/Nuzzle (or similar services) in addition to reading my RSS subscriptions.

This turned out to be rather ineffective, full of duplicates and most of all: too time comsuming. Since I anyway checked-in on my Twitter feed a few times a day, eventually my RSS consumption reduced from a few times a to maybe once a day.

This has been going on for a while and and it became somewhat annoying.

In comes Inoreader

I started to use Inoreader a bit more than a month ago and it changed my whole reading habits for the better. I gave the app a fair try during those weeks and, oh man, have I missed my mostly RSS-only workflow. It feels like in the old days, but in a good way.

The app/service is fast and already offers a lot of functionality in the free account¹, and with it’s rich set of keyboard shortcuts² I can browse through my feeds in a short time.

One of the greatest features for me is tagging. While reading I can quickly assign a certain tag to any post that I want to refer to later or simply to anything with. Extra cool bonus: with these I could trigger IFTTT actions if I would like to do so. Also I am looking forward to explore the filter- and keyword-feature but haven’t gone around that yet.

How it refreshed my Social Media Stream?

I have found my old enthusiasm for reading my RSS feed again, and while I was already at it, I did some long overdue feed-maintance. With the statistics tool provided by Inoreader, I can see which feeds are either defunct or haven’t been updated in a long time. This helped me to get rid of some old, abandoned feeds.

Once that was done, I went through my Twitter feed and lists and subscribed to all the blog/sites that were not yet in my RSS feed and unfollowed them from Twitter. This way there’s a lot less redundant posts and my Twitter timeline became a whole lot nicer.

Newsletters

I’m not huge on Newsletters, but the few that I am subscribed to, I added via the Mail2Tag feature to Inoreader as well. Result: a slighlty cleaner inbox and news there where I read them anyway. I actually added a few more newsletters in the process.

How could I improve my Setup?

Now that I have cleaned up my feeds, my Twitter stream and my Inbox, I actually should start organize my feeds and set up some filters. But that’s something that I will do later, up to know I am very satisfied they way it is.

Inoreader has apps for iOS and Android and I like to use the native apps on my phone (both on Android and iOS), on the iPad though I prefer to use it in my browser. I like to work more desktop-ey on the iPad and the app does work well in the browser, which means I have access to all the keyboard shortcuts when I use an external keyboard.

Another thing that I find very positive, is, that the app/service received a couple of updates during the time that I wrote this³. This is very nice, because it at least shows to me, that the service is under active development, which is always a good thing.

If you haven’t gotten it yet, I am very happy using the app and will definitely subscribe to one of the paid plans once the trial period is over.