How to Keep Up with the Best of the Web

Adam Roberts
Revue
Published in
6 min readDec 19, 2017

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Every day, I tell more than 47,000 web people the tech-related links they should spend their precious time on. Not individually, obviously — via a newsletter called Versioning. The idea is to give people a one-stop shop for the day’s best web and tech news, useful links and helpful tutorials.

No-one has time to keep up with everything, but I have the time to do that for them.

To do that, I have to find, read, absorb and evaluate all the stuff that’s come up on the web — that would interest the audience of developers, designers, product managers and general nice, curious web people — in a given 24 hours. After all, finding stuff to read isn’t hard. Finding the good stuff that helps, educates or inspires — that requires a bit of care. The modern online experience is a tension between the draw of algorithms that bring to you everything you would ever want (and hence, filter out stuff you dislike or disagree with) and manual research and following. The tools below reflect that battle.

While you may not be putting together a daily newsletter, the links you share on Facebook or Twitter, or whichever messaging app you use, are important to people. You could share the link that inspires them to change careers, change their vote, or at least smirk with delight in the supermarket checkout line. Here are the tools I use, along with some feeds and sources I like.

RSS + Feedly

Sure, everyone’s moved to social media, preferring to get their news via the ‘feeds. But I like to be my own algorithm and use RSS to keep up to date with every new thing on a dozen sites. My advice for getting a balanced feed diet is to choose sites with different publication and business models — you don’t want a bunch of sites who all compete to publish the same breaking tech news — you’ll end up with an overwhelming feed full of similar news reports. Instead, you want a couple of those sites, a few thoughtful bloggers, a few link-bloggers, and a few automated feeds (GitHub Trends FTW).

To absorb these feeds, I use Feedly (Google Reader RIP).

I can recommend the following in my niche of dev, design, tech and general web stuff:

Kottke.org (a blog covering a very wide spectrum of interests, very well),

Michael Tsai (tech link blog, often Apple-focused),

Stratechery (Ben Thompson’s blog — super insightful and interestng stuff),

Popular Posts Across Metafilter (Metafilter is itself a great place to find good stuff)

Nat Torkington’s “4 Short Links” feed (tech links, four a day, very good).

Twitter lists

The humble Twitter list is one under-used feature that can make things a bit more friendly — it adds a bit of serendipity to complement the “get absolutely everything” Twitter feed or RSS approach I outlined.

The first stage is to set up lists for any particular interest you may have. To do that, on the web:

  1. Head to your lists page — via the UI from your Twitter profile page or by heading to the URL “twitter.com/ — your Twitter username — /lists
  2. Click “create new list”
  3. Name the list, give it a description if you like, and decide whether it’s public or private
  4. Save!

Add people to a list by navigating to their Twitter page, clicking on the menu button next to “follow”, clicking the option “Add of remove from lists…”, and then choosing which list (or lists, if you’re really keen/confused) you want them on.

Once your list is set up, you can then check in on them via TweetDeck or the app of your choice. My advice is to skip the bigger publications’ feeds (except for SitePoint’s, of course) — to get the most out of this, choose people you actually like, who tweet at a normal rate. If they tweet two excellent links per week, you don’t need that many of them combined into a list before the list becomes essential.

On my list(s), I can recommend:

https://twitter.com/harper

https://twitter.com/rachelnabors

https://twitter.com/webinista

https://twitter.com/aulia

https://twitter.com/textfiles

Read-it-later: Pocket, Instapaper and Refind

Pocket and Instapaper should need no introduction. Between the two of them, they dominate the read-it-later landscape (which they created). Which of these you choose is up to you, but the main thing I would recommend is to set a high bar for what you choose to save, and then be correspondingly strict with yourself for keeping up with the reading list — or removing unread items promptly. Recently I removed some unread articles originally published in 2011 from my Instapaper queue. Learn from my mistakes!

Refind is a read-it-later service with a few neat additions. There’s a daily and weekly newsletter, plus the browser add-on, new tab page and mobile apps let you “save” links, which lets you come back to them later (and makes them public, to help with discovery and sharing). You can also, somewhat confusingly, mark links to “read soon”. These are private, and if you don’t manage to read them within two weeks ( every link ever) they’ll get moved to a “Someday” list and you’ll be able to read them next time you clear that list (some day). Refind is the perfect read-it-later service for my purposes — it has a built-in sense of urgency that I actually need since I’m reading things on behalf of lots and lots of other people. I’ll generally use this for non-time-sensitive links. For more timely stuff, there’s always:

Nuzzel

Nuzzel is an app, site and newsletter that brings an algorithmic layer to sit on top of your social media accounts, then shares with you the most-popular stuff. If a given link gets tweeted by enough people, Nuzzel will interpret that popularity as an indicator of quality, and it’ll get added to your Nuzzel feed (and eventually, your Nuzzel daily or weekly newsletter). If you follow the right people, you won’t need to open Twitter or Facebook to reap the benefits, you’ll just need to open your email and read the news. Speaking of which:

Newsletters

Like everyone else in the world (and at least 47,000 people I know) I’ve subscribed to a bunch of interesting newsletters. I have Gmail filters set up so that when they are delivered they’re marked as read and starred. That way, at the start of the day I have a few newsletters starred to read, a few unread emails that are (usually) important, and that’s it (OK, many other emails, but fewer than I started with!)

Some newsletters I’d recommend:

Mail to Self

Mail to Self isn’t even really an app, it’s a share sheet button that allows you to email yourself stuff with a tap, rather than the dozen taps you’d have to make if you typed in your own email address like an animal. Better still, the emails that come in via this app are all marked as “Mail to Self’, so you can set up filters that send them wherever you need them.

These days, if I encounter anything useful, interesting or exciting that requires more than a second’s thought (most things, really), I’ll hit the Mail to Self button and check it properly next time I’m in my inbox. Quite a few of the links I’ve found for Versioning have started their journey in my Twitter or Facebook feed, then travelled to my inbox via MtS.

With these tools in hand, you should be able to keep the firehose of the internet at a manageable level. And if not, did I mention I have a newsletter that’ll do that for you?

If this has inspired you to try your hand at the newsletter game, check out Revue, a tool specifically set up for this purpose! It’s got a few features that’ll help — you can set up a newsletter edition, then add content to it via a browser extension, a bookmarklet, an app, even directly from Pocket or an RSS feed.

And if you do produce a great newsletter, let me know, I’m always on the look-out for more great sources!

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