Getting more time out of the day

February 17, 2009 4:18 PM

How can I cut down the amount of time I spend reading daily blogs yet still find the stories I feel are interesting and keep everything streamlined and organized?

Currently there are 13-15 sites that I really enjoy getting information from that are all based on different topics so unfortunatly none really overlap. I have thought of getting an rss reader and just browse that way but I was curious if there were a single website I could perhaps go to that will display all the new headlines with a short description. I realize that this is basically what RSS can do but I was just curious if there were any other options for streamlining the process of daily blogs?

posted by mephesta to computers & internet (17 answers total)

Yep, RSS is what you want. Instead of checking 15 separate sites, you'll check one. And you can customize the look of your reader (depending on which one you use) to make it display the information you want in an easy-to-read manner.

I recommend Google Reader.
posted by nitsuj at 4:21 PM on February 17, 2009

I second the Google Reader suggestion. It is especially nice because you can get your RSS feeds on your phone, and read the articles when you would otherwise have nothing to do.
posted by jrockway at 4:30 PM on February 17, 2009

Thirding Google Reader. I don't actually use it because the only place I use RSS regularly is on my laptop (and I love NewsFire), but Google Reader is an absolutely outstanding RSS app.
posted by socratic at 4:39 PM on February 17, 2009

1. Google Reader
2. Profit
posted by selfnoise at 4:40 PM on February 17, 2009 [1 favorite]

I recommend metafilter :)
posted by polyglot at 4:47 PM on February 17, 2009

Google reader + folders. So the articles will be neatly sorted. My bike ones go in the bike folder, and the work ones go in the work folder which doesn't get checked quite as often.
posted by fixedgear at 4:57 PM on February 17, 2009

While I like Google Reader, I switched to NewsGator when it made its clients free. While the web interface isn't as nice, I like how it has free RSS readers for almost every platform that all sync with a central server, so you can read articles on any platform and have it marked as read.

I think you can also add RSS feeds to the My Yahoo! page, if you want another alternative.
posted by EatenByAGrue at 5:04 PM on February 17, 2009

nth Google Reader -- And if you learn the keyboard shortcuts (which I have yet to do despite using it for years) I would imagine you would be an unstoppable information processing juggernaut.
posted by theDrizzle at 5:08 PM on February 17, 2009

Yeah, I use google reader and it's hugely sped up my blog-consumption process. Keyboard shortcuts are great.

If you really want to cut things down further, aggressively skim, star things you actually want to read, then once you've skipped-or-starred everything, you have a "best of today" to go and actually read.
posted by Tomorrowful at 5:09 PM on February 17, 2009 [1 favorite]

Blogdex used to do this really well- nth Google Reader
posted by mattoxic at 5:51 PM on February 17, 2009

Google Reader -YahooPipes(bad content) = Win.
posted by |n$eCur3 at 6:34 PM on February 17, 2009

nth-ing Google Reader. Using the star and share functions works really well. I share anything I want to keep to read later, star anything to read today, and keep things organized in folders. Works great. Even when my normal day starts with something like 1500 unread articles...

If you read any sites that don't offer a feed, you can often use a service like feed43 or something similar to "scrape" the page and create your own feed for it, then import that into Google Reader.
posted by gemmy at 7:19 PM on February 17, 2009

Another Google Reader fan here.
posted by peacheater at 7:48 PM on February 17, 2009

Google Reader, or if the topics cover your interest, popurls.com
posted by furtive at 8:45 PM on February 17, 2009

I use Flock and subscribe to all of the blogs I follow via RSS (very easy to do with the Flock browser). I subscribe to 21 blogs and it's easy to see which blogs have a new entry.
posted by Piscean at 9:28 PM on February 17, 2009

Bloglines.com

Also, to take a strictly topical approach, google alerts (www.google.com/alerts) sends you an email whenever they crawl a new results for a particular search. The alerts can be customized to report as they happen or less frequently.
posted by GPF at 6:54 AM on February 18, 2009

Netvibes!
posted by jckll at 11:59 AM on February 18, 2009