Getting The Most Out Of Your RSS Reader: Finding The Most Relevant Content

As I explained in my last post, I’ve got about an hour before I get to work where I need to consume as much content as possible. Ideally I would like to get to the good stuff as quick as I can.

I’m going to share a few ways I make the most out of my time on the T in hopes that it can help you.

Using TweetMeme

If you don’t know TweetMeme yet, they made a name for themselves by aggregating all of the most popular links on Twitter. Later iterations of the site organized links by category so you can see all popular links within a topic. Each category has its own RSS feed however all the links in the feed direct you to a TweetMeme summary of that link. You also don’t have access to the full text of the post. This makes TweetMeme a hard source to work with, but with Yahoo Pipes and some tricks we learned in the last post we can make magic happen.

First you need to find a good feed from TweetMeme that has the stuff we want. The main TweetMeme feed is usually diluted with celebrity pics and spammy marketing ploys. There’s usually some pretty good stuff in some of the categories off of the main page. If you can’t find what you’re looking for there, they have custom curated channels with more specific topics. Once you find a channel or category you like, grab the RSS feed.

Once you have a good TweetMeme feed you will need to run your feed through Yahoo Pipes to replace the link in the feed with the link to the post itself. Once we have our new feed we can run it through the fulltextrssfeed service and our new feed is ready to go.

Using Reddit

Reddit is one of the largest and most influential communities on the internet because of its strong community and organic ranking system. One does not simply browse Reddit for a few minutes because there is so much awesome content. A little trick I learned awhile back can make it extremely useful in our goal to aggregate as much awesome content as possible.

Reddit is broken down into community moderated subreddits about different topics. Find a bunch of subreddits relevent to your topic and mash them up to create a single multi-reddit. For my own purposes I’ve mashed up the following subreddits:

http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev
http://www.reddit.com/r/php
http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design
http://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting
http://www.reddit.com/r/wordpress
http://www.reddit.com/r/html

into this single multireddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev+php+web_design+webhosting+wordpress+html

Subscribing to the RSS feed of this multireddit consolidates all of this awesome information into one feed I can easily digest on my way into work. Fantastic.

Rince and Repeat

I use these same methods to subscribe to other aggregation sites like Hackernews, newsvine, topix etc. Different sites provide different types of data so you might need to play with Yahoo Pipes and fulltextrssfeed to get the full posts. Also experiment with sorting by date and popularity before subscribing to the RSS feeds. The goal is to find the best content before everyone else.