Make better sense of the news with an online feed reader
Sometimes there’s simply too much news – good and bad. Keeping up with the topics that interest you can be difficult when they’re surrounded by so much else. Fortunately, the worst-kept secret in tech can help. Almost every mainstream broadcaster, newspaper, many magazines and most blogs also make their content available as an unformatted stream of data. Often referred to as an RSS feed, which stands
Go to https://feedly.com and click ‘Get started for free’ 1 . If you have a Google or Facebook account, click ‘Continue with Google’ 2 or ‘Continue with Facebook’ 3 and allow either service to log you in. If you don’t have either of these, click ‘Continue with feedly’ 4 and on the following screen click ‘New user? Sign up’. Provide your name, email address and password, then click ‘Create my account’. for Really Simple Syndication, this stream’s name perfectly describes what it t does: it syndicates the news for display on third-party sites or in web-based applications like Feedly ( https://feedly. com). Feedly filters any number of incoming data streams, allowing you to search through multiple sources at once to quickly and easily isolate only the content you want to read. Here, we’ll show you how. Feedly organises the sources to which you’ve subscribed in its sidebar and displays the headlines they contain – and sometimes full stories – in the main part of the window. At the moment you won’t be subscribed to any sources, so click ‘+ Add Content’ in the sidebar 1 and use the search box 2 to enter a topic of interest. As it’s currently one of the most important issues facing Britain, we’re going to build a feed that helps us keep up to date with Brexit. Type brexit in the search box, then click ‘# brexit’ at the top of the results 3 . When you’ve found a source that you’re interested in, click Follow 1 . Each source needs to sit in a folder, called a ‘feed’, in the sidebar. It’s up to you how you organise these feeds, but we find it helps to group them by subject matter. We already have feeds for Blogs, Photos and more 2 . In this instance we want to create a new UK Politics feed. Click ‘+ New Feed’ 3 , call the feed ‘UK Politics’, then click Create. The source will be added to Feedly, within the new feed in your sidebar.
Once you’ve subscribed to a few sources, you can click a feed name 1 for an aggregate view of headlines from all the sources it contains, or click individual sources to view just their contents. Click a headline to view a story on the original publisher’s site, and use the toolbar to perform common actions, like adding it to your Read Later list 2 , marking it as a favourite 3 , emailing a link to a friend 4 or sharing the contents to various social-media sites 5 .
Anything that you want to read but don’t have time to look at right now can be added to your 'read later' list 1 . This keeps the original content of any saved item from your source, along with a link to the full story on the original site. By using the Read Later function you can quickly prioritise the deluge of incoming stories, saving only the ones you want to take note of and skipping over the others so you can focus on what really matters once you have more time.
Inevitably there will be aspects of some stories that you won’t want to read, even if you’re interested in the bigger picture. That’s where the new Filters feature can help. Click Filters 1 followed by ‘Add your first filter’. Enter a keyword or name 2 , select the feed (folder of sources) you want to exclude it from 3 and specify how long it should be blocked for 4 . Click Mute 5 to complete the process and the number of incoming stories will be immediately reduced.
If you lose interest in a source, click your avatar 1 and pick Organise Sources from the drop-down menu. Hover over a source in the list and click the recycle bin icon that will appear to the right to delete it. Use the dropdown menus at the top of the page to isolate particular feeds 2 , including any that post too often or those that seem to have fallen out of use. Removing feeds that no longer meet your needs is key to avoiding the curse of information overload.