 I mentioned I've switched from SharpReader to Feedly for my daily reading of RSS feeds. It's a big change; I've been using SharpReader for years and years, and it served me well.
Time was, I didn't "believe" in RSS, sigh. But that was long ago, and I've seen the light. Even created some nice cookbooks for you to get started. RSS is the single biggest productivity gain I've ever had. But I digress.
First reference to RSS: in Feb 2003, right after I started blogging.
Later in Feb 2003: Why Aggregators are not good. How wrong could I be?
April 2003: I'm tempted to give it a try. And then: I bit the bullet and tried it. But then: I'm giving it up. By May 2003 I was back, never to leave again.
August 2003, a survey: Do you use an RSS reader? 60% yes, 30% no, 9% uh, what's RSS. I bet if I did this today, "yes" would win, but "what's RSS" would compete with "no" for second. To be tried?
November 2003: blogrollcleaning. In which I found blogrolls were superfluous given RSS readers (and especially, OPML, which I discovered in Jan 2004).
May 2004: My first RSS Cookbook. Perhaps zero of you were reading me then, and tried it, but I know some of my colleagues at the time did. I don't know why but back then it was just slightly too hard to get started. Maybe it still is, despite the best efforts of Feedly and it's competitive kin.
(Love, love, being able to find all these old posts with my Simple Search. Same as it ever was...)
This change was driven by two wants and one horrible need.
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Read RSS feeds on my iPad. My morning routine is to check email, review my calendar, and read "the news" on my iPad, away from my desk. Adding review of my RSS feeds to this was becoming a must, since I get most of my news that way.
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Easily sync feeds and read items between my iPad and my desktop PC. Definitely did not want to read things twice - already such a huge volume of items to skim - and if I found things I wanted to save (e.g. for posting to my blog), wanted that to move from one to the other.
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Stop launching IE! For "reasons" the 20-year-old version of SharpReader cannot be taught not to launch IE when links are clicked. It's an early .NET program and must use some facility that never contemplated the possibility of a different default browser. For a while it did launch Chrome - I think - but now I can't get it do to this, nor to launch Edge (which would be okay).
Anyway I'm trying Feedly, it works on my iPad, works on my PC (via a web interface), enables me to sync back and forth easily, and launches Safari on the iPad and Chrome on the PC. Yay!
So far there is one huge unexpected benefit to this switch. Feedly automatically marks reviewed items as "read" and won't display them anymore. At first I was afraid this would cause me to miss things, but with literally thousands of items flowing through each day, it's better this way. I can consume more items faster. Onward!
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