How to Optimize Your Online News Reading Habits

The question that will be given an answer to in this post is: How to follow the news online? While there obviously are countless ways to do it, this is how I accomplish the task.

1. Mission Target

We want to be able to read the news whenever and wherever we wish, and read only those types of news that we are specifically interested in.

This obviously means that we won’t be checking online news papers or news portals for our news fixes.

2. Bloglines

We will be doing all of our newsreading from Bloglines, a free web-based news aggregator, so get yourself an account there. If you don’t know what a news aggregator is, don’t worry. Just register to Bloglines, and you will learn later on as we progress further in this guide.

There are other free web-based news aggregators, but in my experience Bloglines is currently the best, and has been that for quite some time now. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

3. RSS Feeds

Most news companies, many websites, and just about all blogs provide news feeds. It is thus news feeds that we will base our news reading on. If you don’t know what a news feed (also called a content feed or an RSS feed), take a look at this handy guide to news feeds courtesy of the BBC.

What you need to find out is where news feeds are located. This is sometimes more difficult than it should be. Firefox and Opera, fortunately, display an icon in the address bar whenever a page you are on has a news feed related to it. In fact, this page has a news feed related to it (my blog’s newsfeed): if you look at this page on Firefox or Opera, look at the address bar and you should see a small icon with wave-looking things on it. Maybe it is orange. Firefox calls it a ‘live bookmark’, but never mind that. This tells you that there is a news feed on this site. If you use Internet Explorer, you just have to guess, I suppose.

In any case, here is what you can do with a site that has an RSS feed. When you access your Bloglines account (http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs), you can add feeds by pressing the “add” button. Bloglines will then prompt you for the website or feed URL, and the rest should be easy to follow. You can either give it the URL of the page that your browser shows has an RSS feed, or then give it a direct link to the feed URL. To do the latter, you will need to look around the site for links such as “RSS feed”, “RSS”, “Syndication”, “Atom” and similar texts. (Note that news feeds come in different flavours: RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom, and so on. If you find one of them, that’s enough.)

Homework: Try to find out what the direct URLs to newsfeeds on the following websites are: Movie Say: the Film Buzz Index, The Burnt Ones: Literary Awards News, Akira Kurosawa News and Information, and Lingformant: the Science of Linguistics in the News. They are all my websites, by the way, so feel free to browse around!

If you are into science and technology, also take a look at my list of science and technology news sources.

Note also that news portals like Google News and Yahoo! News allow you to subscribe to news feeds in specific areas (business, entertainment, sports, technology, etc.). More importantly, they also allow you to subscribe to a feed based on a search term you enter. Say, you would like to follow the news related to the Canadian director Atom Egoyan. Simply type “Atom Egoyan” (with the quotes) to the Google News or Yahoo! News search box, and then search for the RSS link (the “RSS” link in Google’s left-hand column, “View as RSS: [orange button]” in Yahoo!’s right-hand column). When you subscribe to that feed, you will then be automatically notified whenever a news item is posted that mentions Atom Egoyan. Isn’t that great! Just think of the possibilities.

For a handy Firefox extension from Bloglines, which allows you to subscribe to feeds with just a few clicks of a button, see here. By the way, if you use Firefox, make sure also to check the list of Firefox extensions that I use.

4. Newsletters

Unfortunately, not all websites have RSS feeds. But some of them deliver news via e-mail. A good example is a collection of news websites (primarily concentrating on war news) a friend of mine maintains.

Because we want to read all of our news in one place, we need to get the news delivered to Bloglines. Bloglines is excellent in this respect, as it allows you to create a practically infinite number of e-mail addresses to which you can have news sent to. Click “Create Email Subscriptions” in the left-hand menu, and the rest should be self-explanatory. Use the e-mail address Bloglines creates for you to subscribe to a newsletter. Create a separate e-mail address for each newsletter, as that will make it easier for you to organise things.

5. Monitoring website changes

There are some websites that have no news feed and no newsletter. But we can monitor even those, thanks to something called WatchThatPage. WatchThatPage is a free service that allows you to monitor changes in individual web pages. You basically give it a list of websites you would like it to monitor, and it will then check those once a day and send you an e-mail telling which pages have changed, and what has changed in them. What I mainly use it for is tracking news pages that don’t give you the option to have news delivered to you.

When you register to WatchThatPage, use an email address you create in Bloglines. That way all the site changes are sent to your Bloglines account, and Bloglines remains the only place you need to go to for your news fix.

6. Conclusion

With the use of news feeds, email alerts and WatchThatPage, all centered around the Bloglines interface, you can satisfy all your news needs. Indeed, if it is available online, you can follow it on Bloglines.

Happy reading!