Every Day Apps: Feedly RSS Reader

Feedly lets me see only what I want to see from the fire hose of web content

Feedly is a ‘use it every day’ app for me. I use it every morning before work to catch up with the latest posts on the topics and sites that interest me most. Most days I take another leisurely stroll through it in the evening.

So, what does Feedly provide to make it such a useful tool - here’s a bit of their own wording to describe its value:

Keep up with the topics and trends you care about, without the overwhelm. Make your research workflow efficient and enjoyable. Experience the power of RSS.

With Feedly, you can easily organize all your publications, blogs, YouTube channels, and more in one place and consume and share more efficiently. No more zig zagging. All the content comes to you in one place, in a clean and easy-to-read format.

People use Feedly to read blogs, learn new topics, and track keywords, brands and companies

I like the idea of ‘always be learning’. I embrace it to try to continually get better at the work I do, and also to keep learning on plenty of other topics that are important and fascinating to me - climate change, and mind and body health, for example. Feedly makes this easier.

As mentioned in the Feedly quote block above, it lets us experience the power of RSS - Really Simple Syndication. RSS has been around for many years; it’s not a shiny new AI-driven tech, but it’s still incredibly useful.

Here are a few of the reasons I get so much value from Feedly:

Single Source: I currently follow around 70 sources in Feedly, and most days I can scan any new/unread content in most or all of those sources with a couple visits to the app per day — and read a number of articles that grab my attention most. I can take in far more information, from just brief headlines to full articles, than I ever could hope to do by visiting individual sites, YouTube channels, or similar.

Available Everywhere: This is a big requirement for me for any application/app that I know I’m going to use every day. Feedly looks and works great in a browser and on my mobile devices, both iOS and Android.

Easy to Use and Highly Customizable: It’s simple to add content (sources) to Feedly. You can paste in a URL for a favorite site, search by site name, and search by keywords. You can organize your sources in folders, decide which view appears when you launch the mobile app, select how articles are presented (title only, summary etc), choose your theme, adjust font preferences, create topic-specific boards to highlight a set of items, and lots more.