RSS Reading Hacks

I’ve been using the Read Later feature of Reeder 4 for a couple of weeks now, and I’m finding it a big improvement over Safari’s Reading List.

The biggest is that it’s under my nose, as I have Reeder open on one or other of my devices most of the day.

The next biggest plus is the Reading view in Reader, which strips out a lot of visual clutter.

Another thing that I appreciate is that articles are groups by website, so I can see at a glance which articles / videos / whatever I’ve collected from where.

(For those who don’t now about the Read Later feature, you can add it as an extra account within Reeder. It uses iCloud to sync your Read Later list between devices. Note that you’ll need to set up Read Later on each device you’ve got Reeder installed.)

A bonus: if you add the Read Later with Reeder button to Safari on Mac, you can save any webpage to the list, not just stuff you receive in Reeder via RSS feed. I’ve found that very useful for building a reading list when researching something. You can also add webpages to Read Later on i(Pad)OS using the Share Sheet.

Another useful hack that I’ve found involves Helium, a Mac app that lets you have a video playing in a mini-windows outside of other applications. I’ve had this on my system for several years now, but I’ve started using it in earnest since I switched over to subscribing to YouTube channel RSS feeds.

While I could watch the videos directly in Reeder, there’s no way to expand them to full-screen. However, I can get around that by sharing the video URL to Helium so it opens in a full-screen window. And doing so has (so far) gotten rid of occasional advert overlays that appear on some videos.

Reeder supports this directly from within the app, and you can even assign a hotkey for the actions you use regularly.

As you can probably tell, I’m a big fan of Reeder. Yes, there are other good RSS reading apps out there, and I’ve used a few (Fiery Feeds in particular gets a strong recommendation from me), but I find that Reeder is just that little bit smoother to use.

Using the Read Later system allows me to reduce the time I spend in Reeder, as I can quickly go through the latest articles, save the ones I want to refer back to, and leave the app. Then I can go back and look through the saved articles at the end of the day, and see if I want to do anything further with them such as archiving the article text to Bear or sending out a link post to my blog.