A great way to read/scan through a fair amount of articles/stories, from websites you care about, is to use an RSS reader. RSS readers have been around forever. A lot of people believe that RSS feeds are old school now that you can follow news/blogs/people via real-time streams such as Twitter and Facebook and achieve some sort of live feed that way. I don’t disagree with the fact that you can use Twitter as a real-time news feed, but this method can become overwhelming very quickly given that the stream is updated constantly, without any way for you to control its flow. An RSS reader gives you that control back. Just pick a few of the websites you would like to check on a regular basis (news, blogs, bands, etc.), pick the specific RSS feed you like on these sites (more on this in a minute), add these feeds to your RSS reader, and voila. All the content you care about comes to you, in one centralized place you manage. You no longer have to visit each sites separately to get its latest content, the content is delivered to you, almost in real-time, inside your RSS reader.

Similar to an email client, new content in your RSS reader is marked as “unread”. Once you read an item, it is marked as read and disappear from the list. By default, your feeds are grouped by the website they are coming from. You can organize your feeds by topics, by level of importance, or any other way you want (basically whatever works for your reading habits). You can also flag an item with custom tags you create to help customize your reading experience (for example: “to read later”, “to share”, “to bookmark”, etc.). You can also subscribe/unsubscribe from any feeds at any time.

To go back to the “pick the specific RSS feed you like on these sites” comment I made earlier. Most websites have a global RSS feed including all their content, but also feeds that only include a specific subset of the content. For example, if you are only interested by the “Sport” section on BBC, there is an RSS feed dedicated to that, which will help removing all the other BBC stuff you are not interested in from the equation, and unclutter your reading experience.

Once your RSS reader is setup, you can access it and read it from anywhere (home computer, smartphones, tablets, etc.). It’s basically like a dynamic newspaper, you don’t have to visit 376 websites daily, the content is aggregated and delivered to you in one place.

I’ve been using an RSS reader for a long long time now and it really helps managing the amount of time I dedicate to stay informed on various topics (design, web dev, tech, etc.). This is how I read through a lot of stuff daily in a very short amount of time, which I would not be able to if I had to manually visit all the different websites I’m interested in...

The best RSS reader is Google Reader. Google Reader is a free Google service, and you just need a Google account to use it.