dmiessler.com | grep understanding - Latest Comments in 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

André — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 06:19:44 -0000

XRumor, of course, is a spammy peace of software - so forget it :)

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Joon — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 06:51:26 -0000

any suggestions on what to do if you want to archive a webpage to a local drive? doing this takes care of webpages that may be time-limited, or which are important enough to warrant local archival.

i currently use scrapbook, a firefox ext, for local archival, but i'm having trouble organising all theinformation. i probbaly have hundreds of webpages saved. i'm looking for a tag/del.ico.us-like system to keep things on track. perhaps a delicious-scrapbook mashup? any suggestions welcome!

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Jon — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 13:25:06 -0000

I follow a similar approach, but just using Bloglines. You can set Bloglines to open all links in one window. So I go through all of the feeds, and anything I want to read in more detail I click on. Then close Bloglines, go to that other window, and then just read, hit back, repeat.

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Doug — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 16:21:05 -0000

Could you share the URL of your del.icio.us shortcut -- when I search for two tags in my del.icio.us links, it is not showing me only the items that I have tagged with both tags. In fact, some don't have either of the tags I requested (perhaps other people had tagged -- but it's unclear).

thanks.

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

shmozumder — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 05:14:28 -0000

For Archive I use Firefox ScrapBook (http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozill....

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Daniel Miessler — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 22:29:55 -0000

Awesome comments and suggestions, guys. Thanks much!

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

LcF — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 13:33:38 -0000

Yes, that's what I am doing. I even use the same softwares (Firefox and NetNewsWire)! Except that I do not use del.icio.us. :)

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Brian Carnell — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 08:06:21 -0000

Why would you want to close your newsreader? It will not do regular updates when you close it. Much better to minimize it.

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

savior1980 — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 07:41:32 -0000

I use exactly the same method, but I perform another step that might be very useful. When I'm done reading the interesting news from my browser, then I'm going to popurls wich is an amazing website that is feeded with the most popular news from digg,del.icio.us,reddit,googlenews,youtube,flickr...

Hope you'll find it useful!

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Brian McNitt — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 03:58:51 -0000

Nice, but why "read" when you can "listen"?? I use iSpeak It from ZappTek on OS X to convert all of the RSS feeds I used to read into text-to-speech audio files, which then automatically load into iTunes and my iPod. The same can be done with any clipboard text, Word doc, PDF, etc. (This is not an endorsement for iSpeak It. I’m sure other applications exist for Mac or PC, or you could creatively combine several apps to accomplish the same thing.) What I find especially powerful about the audio approach is that I can continue to listen to my feeds while at the grocery store, running errands, folding laundry, etc. I can easily fast forward or jump to the next track (blog) at any point. If a post is especially interesting, I will go online to read it or bookmark it with Del.icio.us.

Funny, I commented on this information overload problem on my own blog today. Anyhow, I plan to write a post that talks about how I use text-to-speech for keeping up on tech news and just about everything I do. My computer is almost always reading something while I simultaneously read or work on something else. At this point, I’m not sure I could live without text-to-speech. :)

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Frodo — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 03:31:15 -0000

www.popurls.com .... kicks ass

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

William — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 22:47:17 -0000

Here's a good trick: set your "Post to Weblog" app to cocoalicious, Pukka, or some other similar app, and you can post a link directly to del.icio.us right from NetNewsWire

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Allan — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:06:31 -0000

Some other things to do for you Netnewswire users (not having used too many other readers, I'm not sure that you can do these things elsewhere, though it seems like it ought to be a standard feature in any respectable aggregator):

1. Use groups! There are _a lot_ of quality news sources out there and once you start to amass more than 20 or so (I am currently subscribed to a little over 300 feeds) then it can absolutely become cumbersome to trudge through them all at any given time. So, categorize! Then collapse the folders so you're not looking at all the different sources.

2. Prioritize! Netnewswire has a cool feature that allows you to set the refresh time on individual feeds. If you're subscribing to a feed that is of interest to you, but that you don't need to keep up on _every_ day, then don't. Change the refresh parameters to only check for new content every 72 hours.

3. "Mark All As Read" is _your friend_. Learn to use it wisely. If you have a "Fun" group with 20 feeds set to refresh every two days, and all of a sudden you have a group with 120 new items in it, don't be afraid to _skim_ the headlines and then "Command + K" it. It can almost seem like a waste to aggregate a bunch of information that you don't even read, but sometimes you just have to hit reset rather than get bogged down.

4. Dinosaurs. Though it is somewhat hidden, and doesn't have a keyboard shortcut :'(, the dinosaurs feature of Netnewswire lets you see feeds that haven't refreshed recently, possibly indicating that the source has been abandoned. Use it. Use it well. Nuke feeds that you don't need.

Any other tricks?

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Stephen Lazar — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 20:11:27 -0000

I use Feed Digest to splice feeds. Has a lot of other nice features as well, including publishing the feed to a blog, javascript, or html (I use it to automatically publish some of my del.icio.us links on my blog as well)

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Helena — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 19:52:24 -0000

William: No, I am sorry. I would definitely like that as well. And Google/Yahoo groups. And preferably all in a single trusted system. I wish one of those new portal homepages (live.com, netvibes etc.) would address this.

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Jon — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:40:49 -0000

Thanks Zombie, I'll give that a try. I tried a bunch of different web services that offer splicing functionality but each one seems to choke on one or more of the feeds I add to it.

feedjumbler.com seems like the easiest to use service I came across so far.

magpieRSS is another great tool if someone wants to roll your own but will require a little more coding knowledge.

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

William — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:28:23 -0000

Helana: got a co.mments account - very nice. Does comments just fine, but doesn't seem to track message board threads at all. Any ideas about how to track these?

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

stebbix — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:05:38 -0000

www.blogline.com is the best online RSS reader that I have used. very simple. check it out!

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

John — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 17:39:23 -0000

Try Diggdot.us. Aggregates digg/slashdot/del.icio.us and now Reddit!

How about that! :-)

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Helena — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 17:13:39 -0000

William: I use co.mments.com to keep track of pages with comments I want to read. There is also cocomment.com, but that only tracks conversations that you commented in yourself.

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Zombie — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 17:03:33 -0000

Jon: If you have access to a webserver with PHP and MySQL, you might try ReBlog to collect and republish all your news feeds.

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

William — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 17:01:56 -0000

I'm going to say go with an RSS client. Checkout NetNewsWire Lite or bloglines.com if you want a web interface.

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Jon — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 16:52:28 -0000

I'm sure something already exists out there but what tools are available to "splice" feeds into one? If I could custom combine a bunch of my normal feeds into one I think that would save a lot of time as well. Any ideas?

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

Justin — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 15:58:35 -0000

Might I humbly suggest Pukka for your tool of choice for archiving to del.icio.us? I'm trying to get some feedback about it in the early stages and since my goal for it was speed and staying out of the way, I'm curious what your thoughts are on it from a productivity point of view.

Re: 3 Steps to Highly Efficient News Reading

William — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 15:02:35 -0000

Any suggestions for staying on top of comment threads? I currently use RSS to do all my news reading but monitoring comment threads is still really inefficient. like this thread, for example - I'll drag it to my dock and check it manually from time to time. surely there's a better way?