RSS journeys: Consider the news-reading squirrel

I noted Jason’s post awhile back about his reading routine with interest. My ears perked up again at the announcement of the audio newsletter for Six Colors members. And Glenn had a few words about history and his RSS journey. Surprisingly, all of these developments have left me with a take that still feels like my own.

I’m an avid combiner of RSS and a user of read-it-later services. And I read widely — tech, politics, Texas news, accessibility, and movies. I also consume as many words as possible as audio, rather than text on a screen. That’s an accessibility story I’ll get to in a bit. But even in our little Six Colors family, where RSS is mighty popular, it still means very different things to different people.

Here are my folders of RSS feeds, shown in Feedbin for the Web. I can select one, and either read it right away, or press a key to send it to Instapaper, or elsewhere.

The first step, it seems to me, is to know what kind of reading routine you want. Are you, like Jason, a fan of newsletters or newspapers, who wants a concentrated once-a-day digest? Or do you want to monitor feeds all day, allowing the river of news to wash over you as it arrives? Or maybe you’re like me — a scanner of feeds multiple times a day, who takes read-it-later at its word, putting most items aside for focused digesting in bunches?

Embracing my inner squirrel

So I gather and store the things I want to read. I like the two-pass approach: survey what’s available, mark the best, and read what I’ve curated when I have time. That can also include links folks send to me, or a look at Bluesky or Mastodon. These sources both do something RSS can’t quite replicate — they’re serendipitous, surfacing things my list of subscriptions doesn’t know I’m interested in.

Choosing a story I especially like from a long list — ideally with a single keystroke on the Mac, or a swipe on iOS — gives me a tiny dopamine hit, something like shopping does for some people. Oooh, a new Wired story on how AI will kill us all, or a review of an anticipated Broadway play from The New Yorker. Swipe!

Just me?

When I open Feedbin each morning, my Texas news folder often bulges with hundreds of articles. In the Tech category, I might need to process a dozen stories about electric vehicles, twice that many about Apple stuff, and whatever TechMeme has for me that day. I scroll the headlines and press 3 on my Mac keyboard to send an article to Instapaper — the best read-it-later service available directly in Feedbin, now that Pocket’s gone. From there, Instapaper syncs to an iOS text-to-speech app, which will turn my cullings into an audio playlist.

My approach works extremely well with my tool of choice: Feedbin on the Mac as collector of RSS feeds and reader. I use the Feedbin Web site, though there is a Mac app with a very simlar interface. It’s been a challenge to replicate the experience on iOS, because so many RSS readers force me to swipe or tap twice (or more) to get an article into Instapaper – more to go directly to a speech app, which I’d rather do.

I’ve recently started using ReadKit on my phone and iPad, because it’s fast, offers a good internal browser, is accessible to VoiceOver and allows me to theme my screen just the way I want. Instapaper is a swipe and a tap away, which is one more tap than I had to make when I used Reeder, but I prefer the ReadKit’s look, so I’ve adjusted to the extra step.

To send an article all the way through my preferred workflow with ReadKit, I swipe left on the story, then confirm I want it sent to Instapaper.

Instapaper operates as middleware, syncing to speech app like Voice Dream or Speech Central in turn. What I get on the other end is a playlist of spoken articles that will read to me continuously. Links from friends or from social media, I can pop directly into a speech app via the iOS share sheet.

This triage/gather/read-later method isn’t specific to my speech-based consumption. If you have squirrelish tendencies, various apps will take your saved articles and give you a pretty interface from which to read them using your eyeballs. If not for speech, I might just read everything in ReadKit, but I’d have to start the things I wanted to save for later, which isn’t as appealing to me as syncing, then automating the deletion of things I’ve read.

No to the newsletter (mostly)

My friction point is newsletters. Like Jason, I’ve subscribed to a number through Feedbin and a dedicated email address. But my nut-gathering method runs into an obstacle when I’m forced to view a newsletter’s full body in Feedbin, or save the whole thing to Voice Dream. To read the way I want, I’d have to scan the newsletter in a browser window, and make my article choices there — adding steps I’d rather not.

Voice Dream articles appear as a playlist. They can come from a synced read-it-later app, a shared link or even an ePub or PDF. Voice Dream can also load audio files.

RSS is so much simpler, and I use it whenever I possibly can. But as Jason points out, some content providers are ditching the standard to force readers into newsletters or apps. It’s made that ReadKit browsing experience more important to me, so I tend to read newsletter most often on my phone.

Audio for accessibility

I’m visually impaired, and text-to-speech isn’t a nice-to-have for me — it’s how I get through my reading list each day. I’ve appreciated sites that have added audio versions of their stories. If I happen to be alone, have earbuds in, and have time to read right away, I’ll press Play on a news site post. But that number of “ifs” makes it hard to integrate site-provided audio into my routine — which is exactly why having a dedicated pipeline from RSS to a speech app matters so much.

The happy squirrel

What I keep coming back to is this: the squirrel method works for me because it separates the act of finding from the act of reading. Those are two different cognitive modes, and collapsing them creates pressure that makes reading feel like a chore, or a distraction from taking in the amount of material I want to each day. It’s also what I’m used to. It’s aparently difficult to teach an old squirrel new tricks.