Reeder And Instapaper Is A Killer Content Consumption Combo

For years and years my RSS reader has probably been my most-used application, or top three at least.

I started with Bloglines, then Rojo, then NetNewsWire, and finally (like most people) ended up using Google Reader to consume my RSS feeds.

However, over the past year or two I have found myself spending less and less time in Google Reader.

Why? I have found keeping up with my feeds more and more of a chore, and frankly Twitter has been replacing it - if something is interesting enough, I'll probably come across it via retweets on Twitter or Likes on Facebook.

The problem with that attitude is that it has made me informationally lazy. I have started only reading stuff that people who are already in my circle are posting, and I haven't been discovering stuff on my own as much as I had in the past.

Ed Dale Strikes Again

Back in 2007 I participated in something called the Thirty Day Challenge, which is now just called The Challenge. It's a free Internet marketing training course run by (among other people) a guy named Ed Dale.

Whatever you think of Internet marketing in general or Ed Dale specifically, there is one common theme with him: he always has killer recommendations for hardware and software to improve your workflow.

Both in the Challenge and on the Internet Marketing This Week podcast, Ed has been recommending two applications for consuming content: Reeder and Instapaper.

I have been using Instapaper for quite some time, but the combination of Reeder and Instapaper is absolutely killer.

Reeder

Reeder is an iPhone, iPad, or Mac application that interfaces with Google Reader. It downloads/syncs all your feeds so that you can read them on the go.

I have it on my iPod Touch (sadly, I have no iPhone yet) and it turns out that touch and gestures is a fantastic way to quickly fly through RSS feeds.

Now I quickly scan through the headlines, tap something that looks interesting, and check it out.

Because it is synced with my iPod Touch, I am able to scan my feeds whenever I have a few minutes here and there: in the line at the store, on Skytrain, wherever.

Sharing Is Caring

The best part of Reeder is that it has a ton of sharing features built in. So, if during my feed scanning I come across something I want to read in-depth, I hit the Share button and send it to Instapaper.

Instapaper

Given the amount of interfaces we have to consume content, it's pretty amazing how such a simple application has become so popular. It's a testament to the "do one thing and do it well" mantra.

If you haven't used Instapaper before, it is a free service that takes things you want to read later, stores them, and provides an interface for you to read it when you have time.

To get information into Instapaper, you can either use an application that has Instapaper support built in like Reeder or Hootsuite, or you can use a bookmarklet in your browser. When you are reading something that you want to read later, you hit Read Later. Done.

I don't know the stats, but I'd guess that most people do their Instapaper reading on a mobile device like an iPhone or an iPad. I do mine exclusively on my iPod Touch.

Again, it allows me to read things when I have time whereever I am, and has all my "to read" stuff together in one place.

For me, I've found that the combination of Reeder and Instapaper has totally revolutionized how I consume content, and I can't say enough good things about them.

(Photo: stylianosm)

Using Hazel and Markdown To Make Writing For The Web More Productive

Even though I have been blogging at DocumentSnap for quite a while, I've never taken much time to make my writing more productive. That's all changed in the past few weeks, and I've started looking for ways to make my workflow more efficient.

Various DocumentSnap readers had been recommending Hazel to me for quite some time, but I had never gotten around to checking it out until I finally decided to write a post about using Hazel in a paperless workflow.

Since writing that post and listening to the Mac Power Users podcast about it, I have become a complete Hazel addict. I'm now actively trying to find more and more things to Hazel-ify on my Mac.

So I got to thinking, how can I use Hazel to speed up blogging?

At the same time as getting in to Hazel, I've started using Jon Gruber's Markdown syntax. In the past, I wrote either in the Wordpress admin interface or in ecto, but the latter kept losing posts and it was driving me nuts.

Recently I switched to writing everything in a text editor using Markdown, which I am completely loving. I started using TextWrangler, but now I have switched to WriteRoom which I had gotten free in a MacHeist bundle a long time ago.

WriteRoom is great by the way. Here's a screenshot of this post as I am writing this (how meta):

Since my switch to WriteRoom, I had to figure out a way to run Markdown against my text files and I thought "hey, why not use Hazel?". Here's what I did.

Create a rule to run Markdown

Since I save all my Markdown'ed posts as .txt file in a folder, I set up a Hazel rule to watch that folder for anything .txt. If it finds it, it runs the Markdown perl script against it and outputs it to an .html file. Here's a screenshot of the rule:

Clean up the old html files

I don't really care to keep around the .html files because I can just let Hazel re-generate them in the unlikely event that I need the file again. I decided to keep them around for a week, so here is my rule for that:

Post to the web

If I was using something like TextMate, I could use the blogging bundle to post online. But for now, I just copy and paste the contents of the .html file into Wordpress or Tumblr admin interface and then add in the images there.

What's next?

I am pretty I can improve the workflow of adding images to the posts instead of manually uploading them to the admin interface and adding them into the post there. That'll be next I think.

Do you have any good tips for making writing for the web more efficient? I'd love to hear them.