When you want to check out your favorite news sites or other online information sources, you can take the time to go directly to each site, clog your email with newsletters and announcements, check the updates on your favorite social media app(s) — or you can use an RSS feed reader.
RSS readers allow you to collect the articles of specific sources in one app, making it a lot easier to find the content you’re interested in without crawling through a lot of noise. RSS (which may stand for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, or one of several other possibilities — nobody seems sure) has been around a while, having been first developed in 1999, although it wasn’t more widely adopted until a few years later.
Since then, the idea of using feeds has risen and fallen in popularity (it didn’t help when Google, true to its habit of creating and killing apps, sunset its own popular Reader in 2013), but RSS has never actually gone away. Plenty of websites continue to maintain RSS feeds, and there are a wide range of RSS apps still available for those who want to use them.
I’ve tried out a few, and these are the five that I thought worked best. Each of these works either via an online app or has apps for all the major formats: macOS, iOS, Windows, and Android. With one exception, they all have a free version, too.
When you talk about RSS apps these days, Feedly is usually the first one that comes to mind. Feedly has been around since 2008 and became one of the best known RSS apps when Google Reader was relegated to the app graveyard.
Feedly is easy to set up, especially if you’re starting from scratch. I typed in The Verge, and the various feeds associated with that were immediately offered. I chose the general feed and was invited to create a folder to put it in (with the suggestion to call it “Tech”), and then it offered suggestions for other sources, such as TechCrunch and Ars Technica.
Once you’ve added your sources, it’s easy to read your feeds by clicking on the feed name in the left column. The entries can be marked for later reading, marked as read, or hidden; select Today to see the latest entries for all your feeds.
The free version lets you follow up to 100 feeds and store them in up to three folders. You can also create boards: areas where you can save your favorite articles so you can refer to them again or share them with others. Boards can be very useful for, say, research projects; they also have more formatting features than your basic feed.
Feedly can plug into other apps, too. For example, if you prefer the interface through a macOS / iOS app such as Reeder, you can organize your feeds through Feedly and then read them through Reeder.
You can import OPML files and export them as well (through the web version only). You can also back up articles to Dropbox or via IFTTT.
paid versions?
The Pro version ($72 a year) lets you collect up to 1,000 RSS feeds, save to other apps such as Evernote and OneNote, share to several sites such as LinkedIn, and hide sponsored ads. If you want to try out Feedly’s AI feature, which is supposed to use your prompts and your past usage to figure out what you’re looking for — and also pick up newsletters and up to 2,500 feeds — that will cost…
This article was originally published by a www.theverge.com . Read the Original article here. .