I discovered IFTTT today and would love to have a use case, I find the tech amazing.
But this might be a bit ineffective. I subscribe to a good amount of feeds, and on a good amount of items I don't read much more than the title... I don't need to be charging up my phone with a bunch of articles I wouldn't read through instapaper.
On a side note: the article mentions reblogging reblogged posts or whatever... is there some sort of loop detection for IFTTT?
One of my friends has his Google Reader feeds matched using ifttt to a IM in his GTalk account. So every time a new article arrives at google reader, he gets a ping from bot@ifttt.com .
Take a look around at the sample recipes. IFTTT is a super-powerful tool to play around with.
One of my side projects is to hook up ifttt as a webhook service.[1]
This is a nice idea, and I love IFTTT, but it doesn't substitute Google Reader for most people. First, as pointed out, it is setup on a per RSS-feed basis. But still, take 50 or 100 feeds and you'll very quickly have a problem over too much information to handle. Google Readers deals with this well, but if you pile it into Pocket, it will be difficult to sort and track your reading, and your normal Pocket saves will be buried below mounds of RSS-articles that you may or may not want to read.
To me, the beauty of Google Reader (and iOS apps like Reeder) is the ability to sift through a lot of incoming information and DEAL with it, e.g. send it to Pocket, Pinboard, Evernote, etc. I'd actually wish Google Reader was even MORE optimized for dealing with large and quick information flows (such as - why can't I feed it Twitter feeds, or any page with/without RSS?). And the reader should do some pre-filtering or guesses on wheter the articles is of interest to me or not.
> To me, the beauty of Google Reader (and iOS apps like Reeder) is the ability to sift through a lot of incoming information and DEAL with it, e.g. send it to Pocket, Pinboard, Evernote, etc.
Exactly. I skim over 90% of my feed marking as read after glancing at it (for high-volume feeds e.g. "planets" the title is enough to know whether I want to read it or not), read 9% of the incoming content directly in the reader, and send the 1% left either to my browser or to a "read later" service for deferred reading later on. My incoming queue gets handled at once, a few times a day.
Shoving all that into a "read later"? Not going to work.
A large number of my RSS feeds are subscribed exactly for the purpose of skiming. They fall into a couple catagories:
* Sources of headline level knowledge - basically things I note just to keep my brain up on things to search for later should they become relevant. Also useful for the occasional underreported story I'm actually interested in.
* Light reading - there are a ton of comics and blogs that I enjoy for light reading at the bus stop or whatever, enjoyable but really just skimming, or other not-deep forms of reading
* Feeds with occasional good content - basically i don't care about most of these articles, but they provide a gem often enough that I should monitor their content.
And various combinations of these. Product blogs or project blogs are good examples of this. I want to know when the new version is out. I don't care how they solved problem X, but the problem Y writeup may really interest me.
Spot-on on all points. Also of note, there are "noisy" pre-aggregated feeds out there which are useful for discovery of new authors or blogs, but have content wildly varying in quality or interest.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 36.4 ms ] threadBut this might be a bit ineffective. I subscribe to a good amount of feeds, and on a good amount of items I don't read much more than the title... I don't need to be charging up my phone with a bunch of articles I wouldn't read through instapaper.
On a side note: the article mentions reblogging reblogged posts or whatever... is there some sort of loop detection for IFTTT?
Take a look around at the sample recipes. IFTTT is a super-powerful tool to play around with.
One of my side projects is to hook up ifttt as a webhook service.[1]
[1]: https://github.com/captn3m0/ifttt-webhook
If there was a way to link up ifttt with a opml, or maybe a way to create a new feed out of OPML, that might work.
To me, the beauty of Google Reader (and iOS apps like Reeder) is the ability to sift through a lot of incoming information and DEAL with it, e.g. send it to Pocket, Pinboard, Evernote, etc. I'd actually wish Google Reader was even MORE optimized for dealing with large and quick information flows (such as - why can't I feed it Twitter feeds, or any page with/without RSS?). And the reader should do some pre-filtering or guesses on wheter the articles is of interest to me or not.
Exactly. I skim over 90% of my feed marking as read after glancing at it (for high-volume feeds e.g. "planets" the title is enough to know whether I want to read it or not), read 9% of the incoming content directly in the reader, and send the 1% left either to my browser or to a "read later" service for deferred reading later on. My incoming queue gets handled at once, a few times a day.
Shoving all that into a "read later"? Not going to work.
* Sources of headline level knowledge - basically things I note just to keep my brain up on things to search for later should they become relevant. Also useful for the occasional underreported story I'm actually interested in.
* Light reading - there are a ton of comics and blogs that I enjoy for light reading at the bus stop or whatever, enjoyable but really just skimming, or other not-deep forms of reading
* Feeds with occasional good content - basically i don't care about most of these articles, but they provide a gem often enough that I should monitor their content.
And various combinations of these. Product blogs or project blogs are good examples of this. I want to know when the new version is out. I don't care how they solved problem X, but the problem Y writeup may really interest me.
>> Password is too long (maximum is 40 characters)
I thought Google Readers would have learned a lesson : don't depend on services that can be yanked from under you on a whim !