Slashdot Mirror

I'm not a big fan of blogs, but there are occasionally ones that contain useful information and come across with some thought-provoking ideas. I like this idea of the customizeable email alert; I get these already from my bank and credit card company, and from CNN, why not a blog?

I couldn't read slashdot otherwise myself.

Sure you could. You're a subscriber, so you get a personalized RSS feed with the stories you would have seen on the front page. (You can find the RSS link at the bottom of any page.) Use R|Mail or RssFwd to have the stories sent to your inbox.

The best way I've found for reading RSS feeds is using an RSS-to-email gateway. This way any new articles are automatically delivered to my inbox, and filters put them in their own folders. Whatever computer I'm on, I check my mail (IMAP; using either webmail or a client) and I get all my mail and all my news. One stop for everything. Articles remain unread until I've dealt with them.

This works great. If I visit a site I find interesting, I subscribe to its feed. If it's ever updated, I get the update (or at least notification of the update) sent to me. And I can read it all from the comfort of my chosen mail client.

I tried some RSS readers an got pretty overwhlemed very uickly by the amount of info.. I switched to RSSFWD and it works much better for me now: http://www.rssfwd.com/rssfwd/ You can easily let the site parse the RSS fro you and then send you an e-mail. No clunky RSS reader required.

I set up a couple of keyword subscriptions to subjects I like in PubSub http://www.pubsub.com/, and then linked to the RSS via RSSFWD. Now I get a few interesting e-mails that are filtered to a folder and I can read when I get a chance.

For sites like Slashdot that I frequent, I just visit the web page. I only use RSS to find info that I might have otherwise missed.

http://www.rssfwd.com/

Bingo: safe email subscription to your favorite weblogs and feeds in general. "Safe" because the only agent you trust with your address is rssfwd, and they are teh goodiness.

Disclaimer: no affiliation. Heavy user.

I used Google Reader for a while. I liked the same things about it that you mention: read it from anywhere, keeps track of what you've already read, and you can mark things as unread to come back to them later. The one thing that made me stop using it was that you can't separate the feeds (or couldn't when I used it). It's just one long list.

So now I use RssFwd to send my feeds to my Gmail account, where I have filters to give them separate labels. The interface is so much better, I love it. And since I'm already using Gmail to read my mail, I get to consolidate my reading habits.

RssFwd or R-Mail forwarding to your Gmail account. Done and done.