This blog post has been a long time coming, but better late than never!
I’ve talked to a lot of people who say they can’t keep up the flood of information these days, so I wanted to share my system for processing RSS feeds. I’ve got about 600 (!) active feeds that update at various intervals, but it’s certainly a chore to keep up with them.
I use my iPad 3 with Feeddler Pro to quickly scan feeds. I’ve tried almost every RSS feed reader on the iPad, and Feeddler Pro’s interface is the best for skimming/scanning feeds. It interfaces with Instapaper (another one of my favorites) for saving a long-form article in the cloud that I want to read later (on my iPad, my iPhone, my laptop or my desktop).
However, sometimes there are articles that I specifically want to open and read on my desktop (or laptop), and saving in Instapaper doesn’t quite work for me. Luckily, Feeddler Pro’s interface allows you to “star” (or mark as favorite) articles trivially easy. So you can zip through your feeds, starring anything that’s interesting.
My problem was I never remembered to go back and dig out those articles from the Starred Article section.
So I wrote a script (https://github.com/heybige/greader) to log in to my Google Reader account, grab (and delete) all the starred URLs and send them to me in an email via a crontab every day at 11:59pm:
59 23 * * * ( /usr/local/bin/daily.php )
For those of you technical enough to understand crons and PHP, enjoy!
