rssfeedWe hear a number of reader complaints about TeleRead’s new format from time to time, and we try to make what changes we can to make it work a little easier for people. You may have noticed that the distracting pop-up in the sidebar with changing images promoting recent stories has gone by the wayside in the last day or so. As always, if you have any feedback about the way the site looks or acts, we’d love to hear it, and we’ll do our best to make it work better for you—bearing in mind that we’re probably not going to be able to throw out the new look altogether and go back to the fifteen-year-old prior appearance of TeleRead. Readers, advertisers, and search engines tend to prefer sites with a more modern look and feel.

That being said, TeleRead still offers an option where you can sign up for daily e-mails, as well as a full-text RSS feed. And while we’d really prefer you read our site directly, since that’s where our ads are, the RSS feed might offer a better reading experience for people who prefer to see stories listed in the order in which they appear, without the image mosaic at the top—especially people who read us from the very sort of mobile devices we write about. It’s also a great way to be sure you don’t miss stories that we feel are important enough to cover but not closely-enough-related to e-books to feature in our mosaic. Plus, most other news sites, webcomics, blogs, and so on have RSS feeds, too, so it wouldn’t take you long at all to build up a one-stop daily newsfeed to read.

If you haven’t ever used an RSS reader, they’re pretty easy and by and large either free or cheap. You could probably find a dozen of them just by typing “RSS reader” into Google, but here are the ones I use myself for trawling a few dozen feeds to search for bloggable TeleRead stories every day.

The heir apparent to web-based RSS readers since Google shut down its own Google Reader is Feedly. While Feedly has a few annoying touches I don’t necessarily appreciate (such as the way it keeps trying to upsell you to its “premium” subscription by sprinkling in icons for things that don’t work unless you pay for them), the free version does work pretty well on the web, and provides an API so that third-party RSS readers (such as the ones I’m about to discuss) can synchronize with it.

Though Feedly has mobile versions as well, I’ve found them somewhat clunky and awkward compared to the other readers I prefer. While its style works great for the web, it’s too fiddly and slow for a smaller mobile screen. So, on Android, I use Press and on iOS I use Reeder. These readers have remarkably similar bare-bones interfaces that don’t get in my way, that pull up stories when I need them, and that will throw the URLs into Readability when the site doesn’t include a full-text feed. They synchronize with Feedly so any stories you mark as read in one place will be marked read in the other, too. Press costs three bucks; Reeder costs five bucks, but they’re both worth every penny.

Once you’ve got an RSS reader set up, you can add TeleRead to it by using this RSS feed URL. Just right-click and choose “copy link,” then paste it into your reader where it asks for the new feed source. Some RSS readers are smart enough to be able to detect the feed when you give it the TeleRead site URL, too.

In any event, we hope you’ll keep reading us, no matter how you read us—and please be sure to share any interesting articles far and wide to your favorite social media, or news-sharing sites like Slashdot or Reddit. Our ability to continue our coverage depends on you, our loyal readers—and on finding more of you!

1 COMMENT

  1. I’ve been using Feedly since the demise of Google Reader which I had been using for several years before that. I have 150 different feeds so I have it set to the “Title Only” option so I can skip through lots of posts quickly, picking out the ones that I’m really interested in.
    I will frequently open up the actual site if I think a post will attract interesting comments or if, as is the case with some sites, the RSS feed only includes a stub.
    Feedly’s keyboard shortcuts help streamline the process.

    I keep meaning to check out the mobile options. Perhaps this will prompt me to finally do so.

    Thanks,
    Steve

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