One of my nerdier goals during the Christmas break has been cleaning up my messy and discombobulated news ecosystem. I’ve used RSS regularly for a long time, so that’s naturally picked up some cruft in recent years. Throw in a plethora of Substack newsletters and links scattered across various ‘read later’ apps, and you see the potential for some serious link chaos.
The first step was to clean up my feeds in Inoreader, which I’ve mostly done. Inoreader remains the most powerful RSS reader on the market, packed with features for power users. I make good use of the highlighter, rules, tags, and filters. I’ve even combined RSS feeds to create new ones that I can use elsewhere. If you just want to track a few blogs, Inoreader is probably overkill; but if you want to slice and dice through the information overload, Inoreader is among the best ways to do it.
Several years ago I also loved Fiery Feeds, a boutique app available across Apple’s platforms. I remember loving the app, but running into bugs frequently enough that it soured on me over time. And to be honest, I’ve never quite felt right about RSS since then. So after I cleaned up Inoreader, I decided to connect it to the Fiery Feeds app on MacOS, iOS, and iPadOS and give it another shot — and I’m in love.
I had forgotten how clean and streamlined the app is. Fiery Feeds brings over saved searches, tags, and other features of Inoreader, while adding the ability to create “sections”, which can be groups of folders, feeds, or both. I’ve always wanted at least one or two levels down of nested folders, and this feature scratches that itch.
Fiery Feeds also offers granular control over how the app looks and functions, including text font and sizes across various different views, whether you want a one, two, or three-pane view, what left and right swipes will trigger, and which apps to integrate as sharing options. I’ve only started using Fiery Feeds again for the past few days, and so far it’s been totally bug free. Things are efficiently clicking along for me again for the first time in years. It’s lovely!
After I got everything up and running, I decided to dig into some more complex automations. For instance, I connected Zapier and the app Pushcut to deliver urgent notifications to my phone if a news article met a certain set of criteria. I also opened a Telegram Channel and automated a custom news feed directly into the channel, and so far it’s working great. If there’s any interest in how I’ve set this up, let me know below (or ping me on X, Mastodon, Threads, or Bluesky) and I can throw together a tutorial.
Next, sorting through the various ‘read later’ apps I’ve tried over the years, which now includes Goodlinks, Omnivore, Cubox, Anybox, Articles+, UpNext… (hey, for some people, trying every notes app is their thing — don’t judge)