I’m going to say something quite geeky and sad now… I love my RSS reader. There, I said it. I must explain that the reason I love it is because it’s not your average run of the mill, boring Reader – I use Feedly which looks like a clean, glossy magazine page and is beautifully designed that it’s simply a pleasure to use.
You have the option to log in with your Google account which means it will then sync with your existing Reader – which is handy as you don’t have to start adding the info all over again. Once your feeds are imported you just click on your categories and start reading the posts. You can save posts for later, send them to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Evernote (plus many more) or email it to a friend. They’ve made the feeds extremely shareable yet the screen is still quite minimalist – and I’m a big fan of minimalist as you can imagine!
You decide on the layout, link colours, what you want to see when you log in and how you interact with the reader. And adding new feeds couldn’t be easier – you simply go to the + box and paste in the URL of the site you want to follow. Once it’s found the feed it asks which category you’d like to add it to and you just check the group you want to add it to. You decide on the names of your groups which also appear on the sidebar. Once you’ve read all the feeds you want in that category you click the tick symbol and it clears all the articles on that page.
Apart from the interface, one of the things I like best about it is the option to connect to my Twitter or other social media accounts and Tweet directly from the article I’m looking at. I can also edit the tweet or just Buffer it to go out later. This is how I manage to share useful and interesting articles with my followers and still get some work done!
The Feedly RSS Reader also has an ‘explore’ section which lists lots of popular International blogs from categories that range from cooking, fashion and photography, to web app design, finance and gaming; I’ve discovered some great sites this way and again can quickly share them with people I know would find them useful. I took up the option of using a Chrome extension as well so I access Feedly straight from my toolbar rather than bookmarking it.
So If you’re bored of your dull, cluttered RSS Reader then you should give Feedly a try. It looks great, you can customise it the way you want and it makes RSS feeds just that little bit more sexy!