Straight to readable text?

February 27, 2012 3:35 AM

Is there an online RSS feed reader, with a Readability-like feature, that takes me straight to formatted text when I click on a news item? No extra clicks on readability or instapaper buttons please.

Currently I'm using Netvibes as my RSS feed reader. I use it with Readability to strip articles of general cruft and to make the text more legible. It's a nice approach, but it's not ideal. My google-fu has failed me, as has my search of previous asks.

Firstly, I have to click to get the article to display in Netvibes. Another click and it pops up in another tab. One more click on the Readability button and finally I'm ready to go. For one or two articles, that's fine. But when I'm wading through a whole bucketload of articles - not so good.

To be clear, I'm looking for an RSS reader - preferably online - that supplies me with formatted text (like Readability offers) inside the reader. I don't want to have to go to the original article page, nor do I want to have to use extra clicks. If only a software reader will do the job, it will have to run in Linux, or (if a browser addon) Firefox.

If you don't know about such a reader, but have a better method, please tell.

I should add that I want to read my articles at my main pc, and I'm not interested in any of this "read it later" lark.

posted by Juso No Thankyou to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Feedly is a great Chrome/Firefox RSS reader that acts as a front end to Google reader. It's very cutomisable. I think you can either click to the source page, or, alternatively, have the whole article open up in the Feedly GUI.

Worth a play around with. Netvibes has lagged with the times
posted by 0bvious at 5:11 AM on February 27, 2012

Another way to deal with your predicament... Most RSS sites now have a twitter feed that they push their content to. You could setup a twitter account and only subscribe to your favourites content providers. Clicking on a link in twitter opens a new page.

Twitter really can handle a serious amount of content, and is much slimmer than most RSS readers. It's become my main content provider, alongside Facebook, which is more cluttered, but could easily be slimmed down for purpose
posted by 0bvious at 5:15 AM on February 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

If I understand the question, you want to have all your RSS feeds available where you can click on the headline and then get the full article as it would have appeared on the site (as opposed to inside the RSS item) in a readable format.

Feedly is good, and will present things in a stripped down manner, but it will only show what's in the RSS feed itself in its own format — if you have full-content feeds it will seem to do what you're asking, but if you need to click through to the content I don't think it will get the job done (you can preview the full page, but it's in the page's format, not a stripped down one). I think.

Obviously publishers aren't eager to make this easy, as even with the buttons you're still exposed to their ads for at least a short time before you click the button.

One thing that might work is setting up If This Then That to make all the feeds you want to read push directly to Instapaper or Readability, and then using Instapaper or Readability's sites as your "RSS Reader".

Alternatively, there is probably an extension for your preferred browser that lets you right-click and "open in readability" or somesuch.
posted by brentajones at 9:59 AM on February 27, 2012

Feedly has hit the spot for this particular conundrum. One click on the story and BOOM there's my readable article. Bonus one is the keyboard shortcuts for the next/previous story, and bonus two is a fantastic iOS app that's super quick on my old iTouch.

For feeds that don't supply the full text, I've used this tool.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 8:16 AM on March 2, 2012