How to Screen 60+ RSS Feeds Every Day
I follow about 60+ rss feeds, which I screen every day. On weekdays I only read a couple of articles - 3 at the most. In the weekends I usually about 5-10 depending on my schedule. I spend less than 10 minutes a day screening all of these rss feeds. (However if I were to skip a couple of days, it would be an insurmountable task. At which point the "mark all articles as read"-button comes in handy).
Google Reader All my feeds are located in Google Reader. I never actually use google reader for reading the content. It is just a nice place to have everything located, and it has some nice features which are being used by the client programs I use. Most notable is the "starred"-function, which I use to mark articles that I may want to look at later.
Basic Workflow
- Star interesting articles
- Mark articles as read
- Go through the starred items
- Send actual interesting articles to Evernote
Star Interesting Articles
I mark all articles that strike me as maybe interesting. Either because of a headline that I cannot resist, a topic I am very interested in, or an author that I always read. I do this two to three times a day. In the morning on my HTC Desire using the program NewsRob, which syncs with Google Reader, and allows me to easily star, and mark articles as read. At about lunch I use the Mac program Gruml. Sometimes I run through the list again in the evening using either of the two programs.
NewsRob
In NewsRob you star an article by pressing and holding the article in a list, and selecting "Add Star" - or if in single article view there is an actual star in the top right of the screen.
Gruml
In Gruml you either press "F" on your keyboard (my favorite way of doing it), or you right-click the article and select "Starred". You can also select the article, go to the Article menu, and select "Mark As Favor".
Mark Articles as Read
To avoid looking at the article more than once, I always mark an article as read, as soon as I have decided wether or not to star it.
NewsRob
In NewsRob the easiest way to do this is to swipe right (if I remember correctly this is a setting that you must enable first).
Gruml
In Gruml I go through all the post by pressing ctrl+space. This always highlights the next unread article. If it is interesting I press "F" if not, I just press ctrl+space again to go to the next one. The ones that have been highlighted will be marked as read automatically.
Go Through the Starred Items
A couple of times a week I go through the items I have starred. And open the article in the browser. If the article still looks good, I either send it to my "Read Later" notebook in Evernote, or I read it right then and there.
Send actual interesting articles to Evernote
For Safari (at least on mac) there is a Evernote plugin which is a button you can press, that will copy an entire webpage with design, images and all to Evernote - and set the url parameter to the source url of the page.
When an article has been read in Evernote, I either delete the page, or put it in my "Articles Read and Saved"-notebook.
How do you keep up with your favourite blogs, news-sites and other stuff?