July 12, 2019

Seeking the Perfect Rss Reader

With the rise of social media and pay-walled news sites, there is often talk of RSS becoming obsolete. For me however, it’s still an essential part of my information diet, and the numbers suggest I’m not alone. But I’m struggling to find an RSS reader that fulfills my (I think pretty reasonable) requirements.

Here’s what would make the perfect RSS reader for me:

1. Web and mobile versions
2. The ability to subscribe to many RSS feeds
3. The ability to save random articles from the web without subscribing to the feed (e.g. via a Chrome extension)
4. The ability to see a list of all new articles, then save the ones I’m interested in to a ‘read later’ list and archive/hide/delete everything else
5. A count of how many articles are currently in my ‘read later’ list
6. The ability to archive articles from the ‘read later’ list once I’ve read them (the idea is to maintain a kind of ‘inbox zero’ but for articles)
7. The ability to sort the ‘read later’ list by publication
8. The ability to reorder articles in the ‘read later’ list arbitrarily
9. Bonus: time-to-read estimates

Is that so much to ask?! The best I can find is Feedly, but it fails on (7), (8), and (9), and (6) on mobile. I’d be happy to pay for pro/premium versions if a solution exists, and I would also be interested in hacky solutions using (e.g.) IFTTT. Let me know if you have suggestions!