Ask HN: How do you consume your readings online? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you consume your readings online?

3 pointsdracoli6 comments

How do you consume your readings online? Do you use services such as flipboard, reeder, googlde reader, or some other app? Also to follow up, why do you like your current way of information consumption and how do you think it can be improved?

For me I use reeder on Mac because its easy to browse all my rss feeds but I constantly find myself with too little time but too many things to read.

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I keep reading HN articles and comments until I see "Unknown or expired link." That's how I know I'm done.

I don't use a feed reader (except in a very limited way, see below). Feeds expand to fill the time available. I don't read any blog regularly. I only read things that appear on aggregators like HN or The Browser. One problem with feeds is that you get tunnel vision. I like the variety of only going through aggregators, and I like not spending all my time reading and amassing feeds.

I use pinboard for my bookmarks. I have the "official" pinboard addon (in Firefox). It lets me "read it later." It can also save all my open tabs, so I can declare tab bankruptcy without stress.

I actually don't use the read it later feature much, but I do use the save tab sets feature. But the best feature for me (beyond "bookmarks"), is twofold:

- I can tag a bookmark with any number of tags. A couple of my favorite tags are "daily" (which includes HN), and "learn".

- Each pinboard tag has an associated RSS feed. I use that feed in combination with Firefox's Live Bookmarks (a simple feed reader implemented as part of Firefox's bookmarks UI). So I have a pinboard "daily" bookmark in Firefox, and a pinboard "learn" bookmark.

One of the reasons I accumulate open tabs is that "I really want to learn what's in this article, but I don't have the time right now." Now I just add the "learn" tag for such an article, in addition to whatever I would naturally tag it with. So I can periodically revisit my "learn" tag/bookmark.

I've tried to use Firefox's "Pin as App Tab" feature for that purpose, but it's unreliable, they can get moved back into the normal tab bar inadvertently. Besides, that takes up precious tab space, which is a diminishing resource on this machine.

At some point, I had Reeder, Read it Later, Instapaper, Flipboard, Quora and Snackr that I was using to consume media on my iPhone. Needless to say - didn't work for long.

After a ton of experimenting, I found a system that works well for me. Short preface: I use my system to keep up with about 5 blogs where I want to read every post and then for all the articles I come upon via twitter and HN.

I use Read it Later to keep tabs on articles that I find on twitter + here on HN. Tweetbot lets you send to RIL directly from tweets and for HN, I use the Chrome extension, Aside.

For the blogs I follow, I use Reeder. If you find yourself with too much in here, do what I did: eliminate blogs that you don't read EVERY post for. You'll bring back the ones you miss.

In practice, it also helped me to just pick a trigger for reading through everything, my 'trigger' being after my run. This way, I set aside a certain amount of time to read through everything for that day.

Improvements? I wish Reeder pulled from Read it Later. That way, I could have one app that has all my articles.

Reading articles online will fill the time you allow it - so just decide how valuable what you are reading really is to you and go from there.

I used to follow a lot of blogs, but it's been ages since I checked my RSS feeds. Here's how interesting articles find me:

iGoogle - On my custom home page, I have Fark, Digg, Fast Company, Engadget, and some others setup showing me their most interesting headlines.

I browse Hacker News and Reddit pretty regularly.

My Twitter feed consists of a lot of news accounts. Interesting friends who retweet interesting headlines and blog posts also play a major part in how I discover interesting stuff.

On Facebook, I follow interesting accounts and reshare things I find interesting.

Basically I have it setup so interesting news follows me wherever I am online.

I would think Flipboard itself is useless unless your feed includes interesting people that like to discuss current events. It's been awhile since I've used it though.

I use the Instapaper browser bookmarklet to add tabs one at a time from my browser into the service.

I then use Instapaper's Kindle integration to read a set of articles delivered via email, and then use the "Archive All" and "Download Newest" links built into the delivery to manually fetch more articles when I'm finished with all the articles in the set.

I add more webpages to Instapaper than I read, and I just treat it like a stack, never to get to the older saved items.

I have recently started using Instapaper with its iOS application. This setup is working for me very well. I do read a lot but I also find that a lot of times I find something (on the desktop/laptop/phone) that I'd like to read but do not have the time to do so immediately. Queuing such things under Instapaper (and letting it clear out all the clutter), helps me pick it up later regardless of where and when. I'd highly recommend it.

I use ReadLater - it is the best way to save interesting articles and read them anywhere Flipboard and Zite - for random content

However, it is much better to read Books, not articles...

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