My Tools: Feedly

In 2008 I wrote about my use of FeedDemon as my feed reader of choice. In those days it would synchronise the list of feeds and the read/unread status to NewsGator (remember that).

Then NewsGator changed their focus and FeedDemon moved to synchronise with Google Reader. Then in July 2013 Google Reader was shut down forcing the most valuable feature out of FeedDemon and its effective demise.

I was never a fan of Google Reader but made extensive use of its aggregation with FeedDemon. I didn’t fancy building a new set of subscriptions so wanted an alternative that would support seamless migration from Google Reader. The available keyboard short-cuts were important as was the availability of a mobile client.

At the time of the Google Reader shut-down there were a number of alternatives available and I had intended on evaluating a number of them, but the first one I tried was Feedly and I loved it from the start.

The migration from Google Reader and FeedDemon was straightforward. All I had to do was log-in to Feedly with my Google credentials and then at the moment Google Reader shut down Feedly picked up the work, as simple as that.

My desktop experience of Feedly is primarily through the Chrome application.  This has a wonderful set of keyboard short-cuts that are effective and simple to remember (although the n-key on my keyboard is now more polished than the space-bar).

The mobile client for Feedly is very usable and includes all the features that you need. It looks nice too and although I don’t use keyboard short-cuts on the mobile I find the different working practices fit together. If you don’t like the Feedly mobile client there are a number of alternate readers that use the Feedly aggregation.

There are a couple of other things that I love in Feedly. Saved for Later is regularly used for things that I want to remember. I also love the integration between Feedly and IFTTT, everything I save for later also gets copied into my Evernote. There is a direct integration between Feedly and Evernote but that required subscription to Feedly Pro, the IFTTT integration is good enough for now.

One of the things that Feedly can’t do, being a cloud service, is integrate to the RSS feeds within my corporate network. That’s not been an issue, primarily because the feeds aren’t well implemented in the corporate tools, but if it was I think I would find a specific tool for doing that.

Having read through this post it occurs to me that terms like Feed Reader, RSS and aggregation might not make any sense to you. I looked around for a nice video to explain but the best I could come up with was this one – RSS in Plain English – it’s OK, but needs an update.