Saturday, January 22, 2011

Reeder and Reader change how I read the NYT

My Google world editions experiment has a B grade so far. It's not bad, but Google's news algorithms underrate the NYT and the Guardian. I get too many 2nd and 3rd tier news sources.

Fortunately, my favorite Google Reader iPhone client [2] has changed the way I access the NTY. Reeder.app has integrated Arc90's Readability.

Why does this matter? It matters because the NYT's feed posts are not full text. They're simply pointers to the web articles and they are not mobile-optimized. Byline, my previous iPhone GR client, used to cache these articles [1] so they were fast to display, but Reeder doesn't. Until recently I used Reeder's integrated Google or Instapaper mobilizers to read NYT articles, but that stopped working.

I could use the NYT's iPhone app to read the NYT, but that's a source-specific workflow. Worse, the NYT iPhone app doesn't integrate with my Google Reader shares.

Now, however, Reeder with readability works perfectly with the NYT. To the NYT it looks like I'm fetching pages via a browser, but Reeder's readability function post-processes the page so it renders perfectly on my iPhone.

Screen shot 2011-01-22 at 2.41.30 PM.pngMy NYT workflow starts with the NYT RSS resource page. From there I added about 10 feeds to Google Reader. Individual feeds belong to any of several "folders", but they all belong to an "NYT" folder.

In Reeder.app the articles show as short titles and introductions. By tapping a small icon, or using a spread-finger gusture, I tell Reeder to load the entire article using Readability. From there I can share via Google Reader Shared Items or add notes. Those shared items, in turn, go into my twitter stream. (Typically with truncated annotations. I'm not among those who praise Twitter's insane string length limits).

It's a far better workflow than using the NYT iPhone app. Recommended.

[1] I'm not sure the NYT allows this any more.
[2] There's an iPad client too. A Mac OS X client is in beta, but on the desktop I typically use Google Reader's native web interface.

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