I’ve gotten back into rss reading more actively recently, let’s talk about how I use my feed reading and why I chose Newsblur.
Let’s make a quick detour first, why am I using a feed reader?
While I talked a bit about it in “Food for thought : Social media sent information back to the dark ages” and “How to survive the new Fall?”, I think something important to keep in mind is to cut down on things you don’t enjoy and feeds which post too much.
Why Newsblur?
Well, contrary to the feed readers I used before (Feedbin, miniflux), Newsblur makes filtering easy and one of the core features. You can just click on any item, click on the item’s category or author to filter out or right-click if it’s part of the title.
Don’t want to see those sponsored posts or those awful Top X in your feed? Dislike the tag, dislike the author or dislike the part of the title and never see that crap again.
Want to hear more from a specific author or a particular subject? Do the opposite and like it!
Liking things in Newsblur has the advantage of allowing you to only see the feed entries from things you like making it easier to get up to speed on the things you already care about.
How do I use it?
As mentioned, I love the filtering functionality so I use plenty.
I also categorize the feeds based on who they’re from and or what they’re talking about so I can dive into them when I feel like hearing from those sources or about the subject.
Aiming for 0 unread is certainly tempting but it’s something I try to not stress about otherwise It becomes less of a tool and more of a way to spend time mindlessly which is not really what I want to do.
Well, hopefully this was somewhat interesting and I hope to write some more soon.