Tag Archives: readability

If you consume, you should collate

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I realised this today as somebody said to be ‘What new site are people talking about?’ my mind went blank.

Looking back at my twitter history (mainly links to GIFs and frivolous comments) and delicious (nothing of substance) I turned to my Readability list (just articles).

I’ve done posts in the past (https://paulrandall.com/2010/01/23/condensed-type-1/ and https://paulrandall.com/2012/04/25/linkspiration/) that collate what I have consumed over the week, and I think it is much better way of documenting what is going on, because otherwise I just forget!

I watched a talk by Gavin Strange (@jamfactory) http://vimeo.com/61248847 where he had a page full of things that interested/inpired him recently. Braun watches, old sticker packets and wicked-awesome camera rigs. I’d like to play with creating one of these a week/month as a visual representation for the things that I have consumed.

Readability, or how I stop checking lists when they reach 1000

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For several months now, apart from snippets and links on Twitter, I read all articles on the web through Readability.

When synced with my phone or iPad I can pick up my ‘to read’ list in a nice readable format.

My only problem, I queued up too many articles. With near 200 articles to read, where do you start?

This happens a lot. You start a new service with the best of intentions – use it too much and find you are back to square one with too much information (I decided to stop catching up on my RSS feeds after it reached 1000+).

The solution? This weekend I deleted, skim-read and perused over 100 to get my list back down to 40ish. Much more manageable.

But it’ll happen again, that’s a given. So is there a solution to the problem? Here are a couple of suggestions.

  • Group 1-3 minute articles in a ‘Quick reads‘ section
  • Articles 10 minutes or more go into ‘Long reads‘
  • Articles from the same website get grouped ‘Related reads‘
  • ‘Favourite reads‘ is a previously saved article. If you re-read an article you enjoyed you are likely to stay on the service and read something similar in your unread queue.

I guess this is all down to using the product more; creating a richer experience so that the list doesn’t get large again, because I use it more often.

Otherwise it’ll be like my RSS feeds. After 1000+ I’ll stop looking.