Consuming News
Reading Time: 3 minutes | Published: 2020-03-31 | Last Edited: 2024-10-18
I recently posted about getting through 487 feed items in less than half an hour and I thought I would write about my setup here. There are three primary applications that require some configuration:
Tiny Tiny RSS ¶
My feed reader of choice is TT-RSS. It’s one of the most advanced readers I’ve ever used and can be tailored for any workflow. My basic preferences are below:
- ✅ Enable categories
- ✅ Combined mode
- ✅ Always expand articles1
- ✅ Show content preview in headlines
Making use of the categories is very important; if you have a lot of feeds, getting through them is much easier when you can go topic by topic and leave some for when you have more time.
In addition to categories, the big feature I make use of is keyboard
shortcuts. You can view those from the hamburger menu2 in the top
right at Keyboard shortcuts help
. n
and o
is what I make use of
more than any other; n
goes to the next article (or scrolls in
particularly long ones) and o
opens the source in a new tab. This
would be great except that most browsers automatically switch to that
new tab. If you’re just wanting to get it up there to deal with later as
I do, this diversion is incredibly annoying. Thankfully, it can be
disabled in Firefox 😏
Firefox ¶
This setting is pretty damn easy; open about:config
, search for
loadDivertedInBackground
, and set it to true.
When you right-click something and open it in a new tab, you’re
automatically diverted to it. In some cases, this is convenient but I’ve
always found it annoying and worked around it by middle clicking links.
Changing this setting in about:config
will make it so all tabs open
in the background leaving your current tab focused.
wallabag ¶
My read-it-later application is wallabag, a libre alternative to Mozilla’s Pocket (which they still haven’t made open source 👀) I use the Firefox Add-on so simply clicking the icon will send the URL to my server for download. I also have an application on my eReader called Wallabako. It downloads articles from wallabag as ePubs so I can read online articles while I’m offline as if they were books. A dream come true 😉
Entire workflow ¶
With all that out of the way, here’s my entire workflow.
- Select topic of interest (category)
- Start at the top and use
n
to quickly view then
ext headline and maybe a short preview of the content - If you want to read more,
o
pen it in the background - Continue pressing
n
and/oro
until you get to the bottom - If you have time, move to the next category
- Use
CTRL+Tab
to cycle through all the links you opened and send them to wallabag for consuming later
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