RSS has always been my preferred way of news reading, in which I can easily control the information I care about by subscriptions, so I’d like to share how I set it up in order to have the best workflow and reading experience.
A Good RSS App
To begin with, you need a solid RSS app as a starting point. Essentially, the core features include feed management, article display and basic reading. On top of that, there’re also some nice-to-have features such as full-text search, advanced filtering and OPML import/export for migrating subscriptions. In addition, nowadays it becomes more and more common to have AI integration for analyzing and chatting over the content of selected articles.
Of course, there gotta be other factors included in your decision of the choice. To illustrate, it could be if it supports your mobile device, such as iOS or Android, or you might want a particular UI design with customized themes, or all that matters to you is if it’s free or open source. These are all valid reasons, and exactly why there are various RSS apps for different kinds of users.
For my personal experience, Inoreader has always been reliable as a quality RSS application on iOS, Android and Web platforms as well as a Chrome extension. So today I’m still using it as a single source of feed subscriptions. The free tier is already powerful enough for most users, what I like about that in particular is their featured collections of news feeds for you to choose from scratch. The paid version charges $5 per month with annual bills, if you need advanced features to automate with filters and rules, or subscribe to newsletters(and a lot more functions), I think it’s a pretty reasonable deal for the price.
But this is not the end of my recommendation, because nowadays I’m using another app as my RSS client, which is called Unread. I’m going to let it speak for itself:
Unread is an RSS reader with beautiful typography and a variety of color themes. Unread is available for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Just like many dedicated apps for Apple devices, Unread is beautiful and elegant with very smooth user experience. Among many other alternatives, I chose it because:
- It supports syncing with Inoreader accounts, so I get to keep my previous setup without changing anything
- It is built with very nice and intuitive operations which makes sliding up/down/left/right a joyful thing on my phone
- It has just the right amount of features with the free version, such as subscription management, folder organization and full-text searching
So if you’re iPhone or Mac user, I definitely recommend you to take a look at this Unread app.
Pay Attention to Your Content
Before you jump into the rabbit hole of picking your favorite RSS app, I need to remind you what’s really worth your attention is the content to read. Since there’re so many feeds on different topics, it’s essential to hold on to what you really care about and keep it within your capacity.
I used to believe my interest in politics so I subscribed quite a few channels for it until I started to realize knowing all those political events every day just drains my brain. With that being said, it takes time to know where your enthusiasms really are and as time passes by, they’re very likely to change, so it’s better to look back once in a while and make some updates accordingly.
In addition to news channels and magazines, there’re also other types of feeds you can subscribe to, such as newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels and Subreddits. Inoreader even allows you to add a Facebook page or Telegram channel as a feed source. You probably don’t want to put everything down in this hub, for example, it makes little sense to get a podcast in your RSS app rather than Apple Podcasts, nevertheless, the value binding your data inputs together is to gain control in your own agency, which in my mind is the best pathway of building a manageable knowledge system.
Kill the Newsletters
Sometimes you need to subscribe to newsletters since there’s not a RSS feed available for the content you like. They want you to enter an email address so they’ll send you updates on a regular basis, in emails. It sucks, and we want those updates in the RSS way.
If you’re using a paid version of Inoreader or Feedbin, they offer an out-of-the-box solution with a customized email address(usually in their domain) for you, which you can use to subscribe the newsletters and then receive them just as normal feeds. However, there’s also a free way to do it with this website: kill-the-newsletter.com.
It works in pretty much the same way. You get assigned a unique email address and a unique Atom feed link like the following:
Then you just use the feed link to subscribe in your RSS app. FYI, you should keep them in a safe place so when you run into another newsletter site, you can use the same email address to register and all of the newsletters will come out of the same feed.
That’s it! Happy RSS, and remember it’s not the enemy of phone browsing or book reading, at the end of the day, it always boils down to mindfully learning about the world, thus ourselves.