Ingredients:
- Google Reader
- Feedly app
- Instapaper app and browser plug-in
Newspaper apps have become very popular on tablet PCs and while they provide are really cool reading experience they are also a bit of a time waster, like going from website to website and browsing for relevant information in the days before RSS readers.
Google Reader is a great tool for online reading. You can bundle all your news sources in one place, keep track of your favourite articles (star them) and share them with other Reader users as well as on pretty much any social website. It has even got a notes feature where you can save webclips. If you want you can bundle several feeds into one feed and embed that feed e.g. in Moodle.
Using the Google Reader app on your mobile phone allows you to use all your feeds as well as synching Reader features, such as starring and sharing. You might want to star an item containing video, for later viewing on your PC. When it comes to using Reader on mobile phones the experience is, however, not completely satisfying for two reasons:
- No offline saving of news items
- Truncated feeds are simply a nuisance
There is a quick fix for both of these problems:
- use instapaper to save articles for offline use
- use feedly app for a better reading experience (particularly of truncated feeds)
Feedly synchronizes with your Google reader account and has also instapaper integration. It allows you to star items in Reader, save them to instapaper and tweet them on the spot. There is only one little inconvenience with this tool: it saves your “likes” in Google Reader’s “shared items” folder, instead of “starred items”, where they should belong.
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