A New Way to Organize Your Feeds

When you come across something interesting on the web, but don’t have time to read it at that moment, what do you do?The old way is to add the web page to your browser’s bookmarks or favourites so you can retrieve it when you do have time.

A more recent method is to add that page of interest to a social bookmarking site such as del.icio.us.

This has two additional advantages – you can tag the page with keywords so you can share your bookmarked content with others, and you can access your bookmarked content from any other computer or device with a connection to the internet.

But what if you simply want to note something to come back to later, and have the option of doing that from any device? And if you don’t want to tag it until you’ve read it and decided whether it’s even worth tagging? And when you’ve read it, you can just delete it if you want?

That’s where Instapaper comes in.

This neat web service offers you a means to keep an online reading list. A lot of people have been raving about it recently.

I must admit that I didn’t get swept up with all that enthusiasm. I figured the save-as-bookmark route was fine for me.

Wrong. This is much better. What’s changed my mind is a means to do it that is so attuned to how I read content on the web.

I don’t visit many websites in a browser. I do read an awful lot of content on the web, though, via FeedDemon, my desktop RSS reader.

There’s now an easy way to add RSS feed items to Instapaper from within FeedDemon.

It’s all to do with saving this code in a file called instapaper.xml and putting that file in the /SendTo folder within the folder where FeedDemon is installed on your computer:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<fdsendto template="http://www.instapaper.com/b?v=3&u={url} &t={title}&s={summary-plain}" service="Instapaper" />

That then gives you a choice to send a feed item to Instapaper via FeedDemon’s right-click menu.

Glenn Slaven and Nick Bradbury explain it all in detail.

If you live in your RSS reader as I do, you’ll find this very helpful.

Now that is what I call a really useful web service.

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Topics: Programming, Web Development, XML