Inoreader

While waiting for the demise of Twitter (at least Twitter as we knew it), many people are rediscovering open protocols and standards. Technologies that anyone can implement, adopt and join. They may well be extensions of old protocols, ActivityPub (powering Mastodon) has been described as "RSS you can reply to".

I feel like many people gave up on RSS when Google Reader died, but I've been happily subscribing to feeds ever since. I never really relied on Twitter to surface interesting content to me, my RSS reader has been doing that just fine for me. The added bonus of RSS is that I don't get to see stuff I don't want to see, I've curated a small list of feeds from sites I enjoy. To be fair, the only reason Twitter is still okay for me is because I use the chronological timeline (whoa, the "Top Tweets" feed these days is making my eyes bleed) and I follow only a select few people. So, my corner of Twitter is nicely curated. 

Anyway, enough of that, back to RSS! Inoreader is my tip of the day.

I used to use Feedly for a very long time, but it got super pushy in upgrading to one of their paid plans, which I really didn't need because all of their paid features I'd never use. I paid for a while, just to support them, but then I stumbled upon Inoreader.

As you might have come to expect from my tips the last few weeks: I like tweaking all the little options. And, whoa, does Inoreader have a lot of options! From tweaking the interface to look just the way I like it, to sharing options to helpful keyboard shortcuts, it has it all. 

Something I haven't yet played with is that each feed has workflow options, so I could configure it to do crazy things like send me an SMS any time this feed has the word "Abracadabra" in it, I need to know instantly 🪄

This tip has a hidden tip, in the screenshot above, let me zoom in for you:

So for the hidden tip of the day: This is a feed of Google Alerts, specifically one for the word "Umbraco".

If you don't know about Google Alerts yet, go set up some now! They're a great way to track new pages appearing online with a specific word, or set of words, in them. I keep it simple for now, I have one for Umbraco and my full name at the moment. 

Oh, pro-tip: I almost gave up on Inoreader on my first try as I could import my OPML (rss feed list export) file but then.. I could not find ANY way to add new feeds. The simple trick: paste the feed URL in the search field. 

Ps. Why don't you start by setting up the Tech Tips feed and the 24days in Umbraco main article feed? 💡