I wanted to share how I keep up with reading all of my favorite sites online. Years ago I would bookmark all of my go-to sites and periodically check in on them to see what was new. This works ok but it is cumbersome and you miss out on things. There are the sites that post so many stories everyday that you can’t help but miss something and then there are the smaller sites that post infrequently and you inevitably forget to keep checking on them. You end up missing out on some really great content. Then there is the other problem of finding stories you are interested in but not having time to read them at the moment. You leave the site and then forget about the article. This sucks. Feedly and Pocket solve both of these problems pretty much perfectly for me and best of all they are free to use.

Feedly

Feedly is a RSS reader that is free to use and ensures you never miss an article from any of your favorite sites. Simply sign up for an account & add all of your favorite sites to it. Feedly will then keep track of everything and list every new article that gets posted to sites you added. Then you simply check out your Feedly feed when convenient and scan through all of the articles. When you are done just mark all as read at the bottom and you have a blank slate until more articles are posted. This solves the problem of missing out on articles from the sites you like. Feedly also offers apps on iPhone, iPad, & Android. You can also sign into your Feedly account on a number of 3rd party apps, Reeder being my favorite.

Pocket

Pocket solves my second problem of finding a great article online but not having time to read it right then. This happens to me all of the time. With a free Pocket account you can save any article you come across online and it will be saved for viewing later in a nice clean format and even cached for offline reading. You can save an article to Pocket in a variety of ways. You can add a button to your web browser that saves whatever article you are viewing with one click. You can bring up the share sheet on iOS and save whatever article you have brought up. You can email an article to your special Pocket email address and it will be saved for you. Pocket makes it very simple to save an article to your account.

Using these two services has completely changed how I find articles to read online and also how I read those articles. I typically check my Feedly feed on my iPhone and iPad throughout the day and save anything that looks interesting to Pocket with the handy save to Pocket button offered in the app. Then when I have free time to relax and read I go through my Pocket queue and enjoy all of those articles on my own schedule in the nice clean format that Pocket puts them in. This has been fantastic for me. It can also be great when you are really busy or on vacation as well. Don’t have time to check the web for a couple of days? All of those articles will be waiting for you in your RSS feed when you come back. I hope that this article may help somebody give a RSS service as well as a read it later service a try. There are plenty more out there if Feedly or Pocket aren’t your cup of tea but any of them sure beat doing things the old way.