How to use Feedly to keep up with everything you want to read

With social media, news sites, blogs, newsletters, and everything else on the internet, it can feel impossible to keep up with everything—that is, if you have any time to do any reading.

There are tools that can help though, and Feedly is one of them. Described by its developers as a “news reader,” it can suck up content from different sources and present it all together in a manageable list.

Feedly’s broad selection of features allows you to quickly sort through what’s read and unread, apply custom filters to the content coming in, and save links for reading later. It’s available on the web, and there are mobile apps for Android and iOS.

You can use Feedly for free, with some sponsored ads, though you’re limited to 100 feeds and three folders for those feeds. If you become a paying member (from $8 per month) you can add thousands of feeds, plus notes and highlights, and other features.

Adding new feeds

Feedly uses the conventional RSS (Really Simple Syndication) standard for following sites. Most news sites will display their RSS feed link somewhere prominent, which then gives you a feed of all the stories published on that site. If you can’t find it, Feedly will usually be able to find it for you if you supply the main URL (like www.popsci.com).

To add a new feed in Feedly on the web, click the Follow Sources link on the left—you’ll see you can follow topics and Reddit feeds as well as sites. To start following a new site, just put the website address in the box at the top, then click Follow next to the best match that appears underneath.

You then need to add the feed to a folder—either pick one of your existing folders, or choose to create a new one. On a free plan you can have up to three folders, which help you sort your feeds into different categories (maybe one for politics news and one for tech news, for example).

That’s it—you’re up and running on Feedly, and you can access your feeds by clicking on the name of a folder in the navigation pane. If you find Feedly useful and decide to start a subscription, you can also follow Google News feeds, newsletters, and build your own RSS feeds for websites that don’t have them (as well as set up a lot more folders).

Reading your feeds

A big part of Feedly’s appeal is the way in which it helps you manage your reading as you start to add more and more feeds: With multiple articles published across your chosen site each day, the number of items in Feedly can quickly stack up. Click any feed or folder on the left to start reading.

One handy feature on the web is the ability to use the J and K keys to move up and down your feeds, marking them as read as you go—if there’s anything of interest, you can open it up in a new tab. Up at the top of each feed and folder you get an icon that looks like a checkmark, and you can click this to mark everything on screen as read.

You’ve got a choice of four layouts to pick from for each feed and folder, which you can find by clicking the icon just to the left of the heart icon (it’ll change shape depending on the currently selected layout). Each of the layouts gives you a different arrangement of headlines, images, and article text, so you can pick and choose depending on how you want to read through new articles.

More options can be found by clicking on the three dots up in the top-right corner on the web: Choose Most Popular to see stories in your feed that a lot of other Feedly users are bookmarking, for example. Enable Unread only, meanwhile, and anything you’ve already seen in Feedly disappears from view—meaning you’ve got a less cluttered interface each time you open up the app.

More Feedly options

As you go through stories in Feedly, you’ll notice a host of options at the top of every story: You can share a story with someone else, bookmark it to read later, or save it to a board. Boards in Feedly work a bit like Pinterest or Flipboard, letting you curate articles of interest in a different way to folders. You can get to the same set of options by hovering over article titles.

Anything you bookmark can be found in the Read Later pane, accessible on the left, and comes with its own set of options. Other options on the left-hand navigation bar also let you search through your feeds for certain keywords, and see articles you’ve recently read.

There are a couple of features on the paid plans worth mentioning, to show you what’s possible if you do decide to subscribe. The first is filters: It’s possible to exclude certain stories from your feeds if they include certain keywords, which is a handy way of cutting down the noise or picking out irrelevant articles.

Paying Feedly users can also annotate articles inside the app: There’s an Add note button that appears as you open up each story. This can be used to jot down some thoughts on a particular story, or to help you find it later—you can search through your annotations, as well as find all stories you’ve added notes to via the Annotated link on the left.

 

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