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Why RSS Still Beats Facebook and Twitter for Tracking News (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: One of the main reasons RSS is so beloved of news gatherers is that it catches everything a site publishes -- not just the articles that have proved popular with other users, not just the articles from today, not just the articles that happened to be tweeted out while you were actually staring at Twitter. Everything. In our age of information overload that might seem like a bad idea, but RSS also cuts out everything you don't want to hear about. You're in full control of what's in your feed and what isn't, so you don't get friends and colleagues throwing links into your feeds that you've got no interest in reading. Perhaps most importantly, you don't need to be constantly online and constantly refreshing your feeds to make sure you don't miss anything. It's like putting a recording schedule in place for the shows you know you definitely want to catch rather than flicking through the channels hoping you land on something interesting. There's no rush with RSS -- you don't miss out on a day's worth of news, or TV recaps, or game reviews if you're offline for 24 hours. It's all waiting for you when you get back. And if you're on holiday and the unread article count starts to get scarily high, just hit the mark all as read button and you're back to a clean slate.
I use Feedly to monitor around 100 RSS feeds. Every morning I peruse the headlines and read any stories of interest, the way people used to read the morning newspaper. There isn't really any reasonable alternative. Visiting all those individual sites and dealing with different layouts, scrolling, paging, etc. would be a nightmare.
Most sites implement their RSS feed as a "most recent X items" and if there were more than X in however long you were offline - oops, they're just gone. You missed them.
There are many solutions to this issue. The one I prefer is to use Tiny Tiny RSS that runs on my home server. It constantly gathers stories from the feeds I've defined, organizes them into topics that I've defined, and keeps those stories available for as long as I define (even forever, if I wish).
Then it provides RSS feeds of its own (as well as a web interface). I use the RSS feeds from it instead of going straight to the source. I don't miss any stories.
That's my solution, but it's one of many.
Could someone recommend to me a newsreader that will integrate several news feeds into a single one? I do not want to use a web site that I have to log into. I just want an app or browser plugin. Thanks.
https://feedly.com/
I use Vienna on Mac OS X. It's a local application, not a website. To synchronize it on multiple computers, I made soft links from ~/Library/Application Support/Vienna to ~/Dropbox/Vienna (where the real support folder lives).