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Advice on compiling several links/articles over time

Aniej

Aniej

macrumors 68000
Original poster
I read a great deal of online content, RSS has been a great resource and time saver, however there are times that I either find an article is just too long to read in the amount of time I have or I find the article quite valuable and want to return to it several times in the future as a reference. In the past I have either sent the links to my gmail account (typically for articles I will want to reference in the future or if there are several articles) or I will drag the link to the dock (typically for a small number of longer articles) to return to when I have more time. The problem is that the dock is getting too big and cluttered and the articles I want to save are getting too mixed in with my email and constantly going through my inbox to reply to my last list of articles is overly burdensome and frankly looks kind of junky.

I am hoping that someone who reads and saves a lot of online content might have run into a similar set of concerns along the way and come up with a good solution? I would really appreciate some constructive ideas on how one might go about accomplishing this. As an added bonus, if you have come up with a good way to categorize the types of articles in your list, e.g. apple stories, tech articles, music, etc. that would be great as well.
 
I just wanted to put this back out there as it has been a few days and no replies.
 
Do you use a specific app to get to your RSS feeds?

I've been using NetNewsWire for OSX (which is free now) and everytime I want to keep an article "handy" I just throw it in the "Flagged" category or create a custom folder and put it in there.

I'm not quite understanding if this is your problem but.. throwing 20 links into the dock is not a good solution 😀

If you use RSS feeds constantly I suggest you use a dedicated reader/organizer for them. It doesn't clutter Mail.app and you keep things separated to avoid confusing mail with rss.

By the way, If your problem is accessing the files while you're offline I think that there's an option in NetNewsWire to "consolidate" certain feeds and download them to your Mac. But.. I may be just talking out of my @ss 🙂

NetNewsWire Linky:
NetNewsWire

And to give you another alternative of a good free RSS Organizer/Reader:
Vienna
 
Other options include:

Del.icio.us tagging: I use this when I come across online articles during the course of my research. If it's for a specific project, I apply the same tag again and again, and there's a notes section that allows me to record why I tagged the article/page in the first place.

Zotero: a bibliographic tool that works as a Firefox plugin. Kind of like RefWorks or other bibliographic organizers, but this one is embedded in your browser instead of online. Also has a notes feature. Bonus: export your articles in many of the common bibliographic formats (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.)

I use both to varying success for collecting articles. Del.icio.us is great when doing some quick searching for later consumption: when you find a page/site you know contains pertinent info, bookmark it, then move on to the next page. Zotero I use less-often, but it's been handy, especially when doing more detailed research.
 
Thanks for the detailed recs. For some reason I never knew that starring or flagging an article would save it, I guess I assumed that it sort of functioned like a mail flag and that once the news story had been read, and accordingly removed from the feeds as a read feed, that the star or flag would do nothing and the article would just disappear like a deleted message. Obviously this feature is more in line with a save feature.

@Nym, I noticed that you did not include google reader in the group. Is there a reason why you did not? Obviously I am guessing it's b/c you like netnewswire more, but I was wondering what it was that you might have preferred?

Oh and i am currently just using safari bookmarks so now you can see perhaps why I was looking for the type of saving options I was describing. As a temporary fix I came up with making a new bookmark and putting articles "to read" in it, but that does not easily allows me to differentiate between saved articles and the ones that are new. Here's a screenshot, why I think you needed to see a screenshot I do not know.😀
 

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