Feeding Myself With Feedly

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I find the number of RSS feeds I have to read quite overwhelming. I subscribe to more than 100 feeds and keep adding new ones all the time (in fact, about three months ago the figure was 200).

Changing My Feed Reader

For some time my feed reader of choice was Google Reader, but although it’s easy to use, the interface has never pleased me. That’s why I was delighted to find out about Feedly, a Firefox add-on that integrates fully with Google Reader and provides a much better reading experience.

Magazine Interface

Feedly takes the feeds in Google Reader and creates a magazine within your browser window. The magazine is complete with a cover page which includes post snippets and photos and individual pages for your categories, which also have snippets and photos. You can set preferences for how the feeds display, though it works well out of the box.

Social Integration

Other sources you can use include Firefox live bookmarks, a My Yahoo page, Netvibes and Bloglines. You can also include account information for Twitter and Friendfeed, allowing you to tweet and comment from the post viewing window and to follow Friendfeed conversations.

Browser Preview

One of my favorite features is the preview link that appears when viewing a post. If you are reading a post from a partial feed, you can use the preview link to read the post without leaving the browser window - a killer feature in my opnion.

Feedly Features

You can recommend posts (that’s like sharing); annotate them (sharing with a comment) or save them for later (like adding a star). You can subscribe and unsubscribe and Google Reader will update automatically. Feedly even helps you keep track of which posts you interact with most, using simple color coding in the spring cleaning interface to indicate which blogs are hot, warm or very cool. I haven’t used Google Reader since installing Feedly two weeks ago.