Detailed Notes
This is a tutorial and overview for the RSS Reader and Promoter (reader.rb-sns.com) site. Our goal was to provide an easy way to read and share articles. You can schedule posts for social media sites and easily keep up with all of the latest news. While we have started a list of RSS feeds for your use, you can easily add any others to the list, and they will be shared with other users. However, you will be able to keep track of which article you have read or shared.
A Repository of Articles When we grab the articles for a feed, we store as much of the original content as possible. Therefore, you can refer to posts made years ago and long after a site has ceased to exist. The Internet can often feel like shifting sand. One of our goals is to make it a little more firm and useful for discussions.
Users can share articles and add comments around the post (limited to the social site features) and see both the original content and their share comments.
Getting Started It is (currently) free and easy to get started. Just register an account on reader.rb-sns.com. Then click on the "Subscribe to New Feed" button on the home page. You can add a new feed or select one that someone else has created. You should see posts for a brand new feed appear within a day. If not, please send an email to [email protected] so we can help get it live. Please note that some feeds provide limited article information, so you may not get as much as others.
Once you have subscribed to feeds, click on the Articles menu item. This will pull the most recent 100 unread articles matching your feed or across all subscribed feeds. You can mark an item as read or click on the read article or post article buttons to shift it to read status. We offer the full article content where possible. You can click on view original to go to the original site link (if still available).
Post Targets You can read articles almost immediately upon subscribing to feeds. However, if you want to share them, you need to set up targets for those shares. This is done on the post targets page. A button labeled "Create A New Target" takes you to link to your social sites. All you have to do to get started is pick a name for the target and select the social site.
An example would be to create a target for your personal Twitter feed. You can label it "Personal Twitter" and then select Twitter as the "lkpTarget." Once you save a target, click on edit to Authorize the target. That will take you through the site-specific steps to authorize RSS Reader to post to your feed or page.
Posting Articles When you post an article, you can add content to your post. This is entered in the description text field. Sites vary support for this, so test it out for your chosen targets. You can also add an image URL for sites that support that. Currently, we have limited image support. Select a target site you have configured (via Post Targets) and set a time to post it. You can set up time slots for scheduled posts to ease your administration of regular content flow.
Once you post the item, it can be viewed via the Articles view activity filter or "My Schedule" menu item. You can post and duplicate to quickly post to one target and then select a second target or time to post the article.
Scheduling Posts We do not have to post an article right away. We can set it to go out in the future. This is done by selecting the desired date and time on the post screen. You can streamline this process by going to the "Time Slots" page. Here you enter a day, time, and target site to give yourself some pre-built time slots throughout the week. These can be deleted if you want to change them around. These will show up in the slots selector on the "post" page to speed data entry for upcoming posts and avoid doing date arithmetic in your head.
Unused Articles Articles that have been marked read but never posted fall into the unused category. You can always run back through these for more content. Note that it pulls all articles, which can become a rather long list and take some time to retrieve. However, you can read or post articles from here and catch up on things you may have found uninteresting in the past.
Feel free to check back here regularly for updates and a FAQ as we get feedback on the RSS Reader and Promoter. You can also click on the contact form to send us ideas or bug reports. Enjoy!
Transcript Text
[Music] um so there you go so you can come in and let me find one that's a little so like if i do rs technica this one's probably a little more and then this gives you as best it can it this is the article that it pulls out and so it's going to have embedded html things like that so you get some things like this where you get things sometimes are a little funky because of the way um the way the site does their their html but also even from there i could look at that and say well this doesn't help me enough so i'm going to go back and jump back over the original and be able to see the actual article and you will see in some cases like this where there's you know there's not the rsv rss feed does not necessarily make available all of the text of the article but at least from a you know take a look at what's out there give yourself that like here you can sort of take a look through it and then you come back later and you say oh you know what i want to read the actual article i see that there's got to be more to it and so you do so so there's your you know your basics like i said you can always jump in and create a new feed if you want to it will take a little bit it'll show up and automatically if you create it it will automatically subscribe you to it and it'll show up but you may not necessarily have articles right away because you have to wait till that roughly i think i said every two hours that it does a pull of uh stuff and of course you can see here i've subscribed to um new york times developer and arts technica but i can see here like here's an arts technica article that shows in just recent articles and this does not have here it does not track user reads so if i look at this xkcd if i go take a look at this little article and if i come back and do a refresh then it's still there it's not this this page off my home page this is just random you know articles and i may look at something and say oh wow developing or videos that's pretty cool i like that so i'm gonna go in and try to subscribe to that and i'm assuming somewhere yeah so i want to subscribe to that and i can come back and i can see that now i've subscribed to the videos as well as the the primary so that's your basics for jumping in and being able to quickly you know just follow rss feeds let's see so we'll flip back over here so i'm posting which is the next little piece which is i guess really the the other you know if there's a y a and b you know two primary or a one a and a one b reason for this one was for reading and the other was for sharing and posting articles out somewhere this is a little more um this is a little more crude right now it's definitely a 1-0 version of doing this but what you'll do here is you'll select a target you'll click configure that account usually it's and you probably have seen this before where you'll have to you know it'll take you to the account to the to the site it'll ask you for certain permissions and then at that point you'll be able to select that target from a drop down within posting you can add some text and you can post immediately or schedule for the future and so i'm going to flip back over to here and so we talked about so my feeds is where i get my my information where i get the feeds that i'm going to reading and so targets are places that i can actually post to and those are sort of limited right now so i can create a target and uh let's say i want to use twitter and i'm going to call this the uh i'm trying to remember which twitter account i think so i can do like uh this would be rv consulting twitter whoops if i can do this right i'll just call our consulting so now if i save this the first thing it's going to do is so now i have this as a target and actually if i go to whoops if i go to an article and hit post then i can see he's coming from all of them so um he's gonna i can see a target out there and i can actually post to it but this one if i go to that is not full yet it's gonna end up failing because what i have to do is i have to actually authorize it so if i authorize it's going to go out here uh i don't even know if this will work let's see i don't know if that'll log in nope that's not the one that's what i thought so now i gotta remember what the password was let's see if i can get one that i can remember so i can just get it nope so what is this already see pose is it that it is not that it is not that there we go okay so now i can authorize it i know it's going to come in and it's going to do my login and so now if i have my post targets it's going to be now this is authenticated so i can actually post to it and so if i come in now and let's say um let's get something if i'm going to go there let's just i'm going to clean a few of these out not markers red markers red markers red actually let's just off of this one let's just clear the new york times so let's just do that so there's probably a ton of articles there we go gets those so now if i do view all there's not going to be any there because there's nothing that's not red oh let's see so let's do something from maybe here we go we'll do a i went with that sounds like it could be an interesting enough article so i'm going to take a look at it so when i do a post i have the post information up at the top but it actually gives me as much as it can of the article below so i could always just bail out of this if i wanted to but you know especially if i say oh that looks like a good title and then i look in at the the summary and say ah that's not a good use of a yeah it's not a good article now by default it's going to build out a description and it'll show in your your posts and it's based off of the title which you can see up here and then it gives a link that's a link that we've built a link to the original article which you're going to usually see and let's just say i'm going to add something so this is a test post i can add an image which is not supported by all social sites right now again sort of like a 1.0 interface so we'll probably drop those based on what your your post is you can see his status but right now it's going to come in it's just going to be scheduled because that's all i've got i haven't actually done anything with it um so i'm going to go out there let me go to the twitter i'm just going to go ahead and post it right now slots i will talk about in a little bit so if i do post item and duplicate uh i'll go ahead and do that then it's going to show me that here's a prior post so i posted this at this time and this is going to be off of um uh generat uh greenwich mean time is the default right now uh so i can adjust that as needed but um so that thing's going it's gonna say that i posted that i can now post again and it copies like here because it had posted a duplicate it duplicated everything so this is the same target same time everything i could come in and pick a different i could do the same time tomorrow and post it and duplicate again or i could just post it and once i'm done with the post it's going to bring me back out to articles so if i go out to hopefully it's on this if i go to twitter i think i'm already logged in uh whatever then if i look at oh here we go oh it has not run looks like it hasn't run through yet because of whoops whatever it was i posted let's see if it shows here in a minute oh this kicked out an hour ago waiting and waiting all right i'm gonna give it a minute while i'm going through here we'll check that again but we should be able to see we'll probably see that go through assuming where did i go i'm assuming that that did go through now i can see um my schedule oh so this one hasn't gone through yet it's still in the to be done oh i bet it's because that actually is not hit that time yet um but i can remove it so i can i can say since if it hasn't gone yet i can go ahead and remove it out yes this is i said it was posted so let's see how that works out i can also go back from here i can see um unreal unused articles so i can actually build out of my list of stuff what i wanted to work with so let me go back because i think the next yeah so the next thing i want to do is talk about scheduling a post so we've we've talked about this you know doing sort of an instantaneous but there's a couple little features to allow us to use uh do the same thing but actually schedule into the future a little better than that uh we've already so we have the ability to look at the unused articles as i've i've shown a couple times here you can look at some of the upcoming posts that you've scheduled which is uh from here i can go take a look at it i can look at the history so i could actually have some that i've posted you know multiple times that would all show up here with that whoop there we go um with that we can look at our some of our past posts and we can even repost good articles oh let's do this first and so i'll go look at that a little bit more here in a second do another little uh demo and then we can as i mentioned you can upload a logo when you add a feed i'm going to look at show you sort of grabbing a feed url in case you wanted to add one yourself give it a meaningful name and description and actually i've switched this i used to load the articles every 24 hours but i actually have flipped it down to two just to see how it goes particularly from some of the sites that are much more active some only do it and they'll only actually post articles once uh maybe even once a week a lot of them once a day even some bigger ones that you like the aws uh amazon's just sort of general clearinghouse of their articles and only posts really i think once a day but then you get some others so if you pick up like new york times or fox news or one of those kinds of places then they they show stuff up on a very regular basis so i went to the two hours just to make it a little more useful uh when i let's uh let's start with the feeds so one things i mentioned when you add a feed is that you want to give it a meaningful name because this is these are feeds other people are going to see so now uh for example i've got oh that i've already subscribed to i've got rs technica but i can there are places out there that will you can do a search for feeds of a certain type and so i could pick here and go out and see like and you've probably heard of like techcrunch and engadget and verge um pc world who knows that that was still out there cnet some of those kinds of things gadgets pc magazine so there's a whole bunch of stuff out here well one that i don't have right now is techcrunch so what i can do is i can say you know what i'm going to create a techcrunch one so i'm going to go back over here and this is the feed so i can just copy this link and i'm going to put that right into the feed link and if i look at this in like chrome for example i'm going to see it probably through feed burner oh no this one actually isn't a feed burner so this is a raw feed so this is what you're normally going to see it's a raw xml article feed everybody's is there's some core stuff but some include more information than others so not all of this is brought in to the um the rss reader but stuff that's useful for the most part is so arch technica i'm just going to say for the description i'm going to actually use theirs now here you can actually see they actually tell you how often you're going to see stuff so you know 11 posts a day on ours technical is your average i'm going to make that my description uh i will clean this up a little bit that'll work uh we'll leave that there and this is gonna be techcrunch and then actually what i can do is because i'm me i'm gonna take oh sorry i grabbed the wrong one so if i come in here and do that there we go and we're going to put it and i'm actually going to take that image i'm just going to save it to my downloads folder and then i'm going to upload it and so i'm going to actually use theirs which with most of these i'm until this is a paid app i'm not going to be too worried about it but typically i'm assuming you can sort of use that because it is identifying it as their stuff everything and you will see so if i do add feed i'm going to have that now in my description and that thing has not i don't have access to that for some reason so something broken in that link but you can see now i've got techcrunch and it's going to show up i don't have any articles yet but once it does anywhere i see an article we do you know we give proper credit so you're going to see what feed those things come from and this is named off of this comes from the feeds actual name now note that there is no way to edit a feed for users at this point there's no way to edit that uh once you've got one in there other than you can subscribe and unsubscribe so as we grow uh that's gonna be one of the things that's gonna be you know looked into is making sure that an artic that a feed brings articles in uh that they're readable because there's some cases where the it's broken html that just doesn't it does not bode well for for example doing this uh you know on the primary reading although most of them if i go in and read the article in most cases that's gonna it may not be pretty but it's at least readable you
Transcript Segments
[Music]
um so there you go so you can come in
and let me find one that's a little
so like if i do rs technica
this one's probably a little more
and then this gives you as best it can
it this is the article that it pulls out
and so it's going to have embedded html
things like that so you get some things
like this where you get things sometimes
are a little funky because of the way
um the way the site does their their
html
but also
even from there i could look at that and
say well this doesn't help me enough so
i'm going to go back
and jump back over the original and be
able to see the actual article and you
will see in some cases like this where
there's
you know there's not
the rsv rss feed does not necessarily
make available all of the text of the
article
but at least from a
you know take a look at what's out there
give yourself that like here you can
sort of take a look through it and then
you come back later and you say oh you
know what
i want to read the actual article i see
that there's got to be more to it and so
you do so
so there's your you know your basics
like i said you can always jump in and
create a new feed if you want to it will
take a little bit it'll show up
and automatically if you create it it
will automatically subscribe you to it
and
it'll show up but you may not
necessarily have articles right away
because you have to wait till that
roughly i think i said every two hours
that it does a pull
of uh stuff and of course you can see
here i've subscribed to
um new york times developer and arts
technica but i can see here like here's
an arts technica article that shows in
just recent articles and this does not
have here it does not track user reads
so if i look at this xkcd
if i go take a look at this little
article and if i come back and do a
refresh
then it's still there it's not this this
page off my home page this is just
random you know articles and i may look
at something and say oh wow developing
or videos
that's pretty cool i like that so i'm
gonna go in
and try to subscribe to that and i'm
assuming somewhere yeah so i want to
subscribe to that
and i can come back and i can see that
now i've subscribed to the videos as
well as the the primary
so that's your basics for
jumping in and being able to quickly you
know just follow rss feeds
let's see so we'll flip back over here
so i'm posting which is the next little
piece which is i guess really the the
other you know if there's a y a and b
you know two primary or a one a and a
one b reason for this
one was for reading and the other was
for sharing and posting articles out
somewhere
this is a little more
um
this is a little more crude right now
it's definitely a 1-0
version of doing this but
what you'll do here is you'll select a
target
you'll click configure that account
usually it's and you probably have seen
this before where you'll have to you
know it'll take you to the account to
the to the site it'll ask you for
certain permissions
and then at that point you'll be able to
select that target from a drop down
within posting you can add some text and
you can post immediately or schedule for
the future
and so i'm going to flip back over to
here
and so we talked about so my feeds is
where i get my
my information where i get the feeds
that i'm going to reading and so targets
are places that i can actually post to
and those are sort of limited right now
so i can create a target
and uh let's say i want to use twitter
and i'm going to call this the uh
i'm trying to remember which twitter
account i think so i can do like
uh this would be rv consulting twitter
whoops
if i can do this right
i'll just call our consulting so now if
i save this the first thing it's going
to do is so now
i have this as a target
and actually if i go to whoops if i go
to an article
and hit post
then
i can see
he's coming from all of them so
um
he's gonna i can see a target out there
and i can actually post to it
but this one if i go to that is not full
yet it's gonna end up failing
because
what i have to do is i have to actually
authorize it
so if i authorize it's going to go out
here
uh
i don't even know if this will work
let's see i don't know if that'll log in
nope that's not the one that's what i
thought
so
now i gotta remember what the password
was
let's see if i can get one that i can
remember so i can just get it
nope
so what is this
already see pose
is it that
it is not that
it is not that
there we go okay so now i can authorize
it
i know it's going to come in and it's
going to do my
login
and so now
if i have my post targets it's going to
be now this is authenticated so i can
actually post to it
and
so if i come in now
and let's say um let's get something if
i'm going to go there let's just i'm
going to clean a few of these out not
markers red markers red markers red
actually let's just off of this one
let's just clear the new york times
so let's just do that
so there's probably a ton of articles
there we go gets those so now if i do
view all there's not going to be any
there because there's nothing that's not
red
oh let's see so let's do
something from maybe
here we go we'll do a i went with that
sounds like it could be an interesting
enough article so i'm going to take a
look at it
so when i do a post
i have the post information up at the
top but it actually gives me as much as
it can of the article below so i could
always just bail out of this if i wanted
to
but you know especially if i say oh that
looks like a good title and then i look
in at the the summary and say ah that's
not a good use of a yeah it's not a good
article
now by default
it's going to build out a description
and it'll show in your
your posts
and it's based off of the title which
you can see up here and then it gives a
link that's a link that we've built
a link to the original article which
you're going to usually see
and let's just say i'm going to add
something so
this is a
test post
i can add an image which is not
supported by all social sites right now
again sort of like a 1.0 interface so
we'll probably drop those based on what
your
your post is
you can see his status but right now
it's going to come in it's just going to
be scheduled because that's all i've got
i haven't actually done anything with it
um so i'm going to go out there let me
go to the twitter i'm just going to go
ahead and post it right now
slots i will talk about in a little bit
so if i do post item and duplicate
uh i'll go ahead and do that
then it's going to show me that here's a
prior post so i posted this
at this time
and this is going to be off of um
uh generat uh greenwich mean time is the
default right now
uh so i can adjust that as needed but um
so that thing's going it's gonna say
that i posted that i can now post again
and it copies like here
because it had posted a duplicate it
duplicated everything so this is the
same target same time everything i could
come in and pick a different i could do
the same time tomorrow
and
post it and duplicate again or i could
just post it and once i'm done with the
post
it's going to bring me back out to
articles
so if i go out to
hopefully it's on this
if i go to
twitter i think i'm already logged in
uh
whatever
then if i look at
oh here we go
oh it has not run looks like it hasn't
run through yet
because
of whoops whatever it was i posted let's
see if it shows here in a minute
oh this kicked out an hour ago
waiting and waiting
all right i'm gonna give it a minute
while i'm going through here we'll check
that again but we should be able to see
we'll probably see that go through
assuming
where did i go i'm assuming that that
did go through
now i can see um
my schedule
oh so this one hasn't gone through yet
it's still in the to be done oh i bet
it's because that actually is not hit
that time yet
um
but i can remove it so i can i can say
since if it hasn't gone yet i can go
ahead and remove it out yes this is i
said it was posted so let's see how that
works out i can also go back from here i
can see
um unreal unused articles so i can
actually build out of my
list of stuff
what i wanted to work with
so let me go back because i think the
next yeah so the next thing i want to do
is talk about scheduling a post so we've
we've talked about this you know doing
sort of an instantaneous but there's a
couple little features to allow us to
use
uh do the same thing but actually
schedule into the future a little better
than that uh we've already so we have
the ability to look at the unused
articles as i've i've
shown a couple times here
you can look at some of the upcoming
posts that you've scheduled which is
uh from here i can go take a look at it
i can look at the history so i could
actually have some that i've posted you
know multiple times that would all show
up here
with that whoop
there we go
um with that we can look at our some of
our past posts and we can even repost
good articles oh let's do this first
and so i'll go look at that a little bit
more here in a second do another little
uh demo
and then we can as i mentioned you can
upload a logo when you add a feed
i'm going to look at show you sort of
grabbing a feed url in case you wanted
to add one yourself give it a meaningful
name and description and actually i've
switched this i used to load the
articles every 24 hours but i actually
have flipped it down to two
just to see how it goes particularly
from
some of the sites that are much more
active some only do it and they'll only
actually post articles once uh
maybe even once a week
a lot of them once a day
even some bigger ones that you like the
aws
uh amazon's just sort of general
clearinghouse of their articles and only
posts really i think once a day
but then you get some others so if you
pick up like new york times or fox news
or one of those kinds of places then
they
they show stuff up on a very regular
basis so
i went to the two hours just to make it
a little more useful
uh when i
let's uh let's start with the feeds
so
one things i mentioned when you add a
feed
is that you want to give it a meaningful
name because this is these are feeds
other people are going to see
so now uh for example i've got
oh that i've already subscribed to i've
got rs technica but i can there are
places out there that will you can do a
search for feeds of a certain type
and so i could pick here
and go out and see like and you've
probably heard of like techcrunch and
engadget and verge
um pc world who knows that that was
still out there cnet some of those kinds
of things gadgets
pc magazine so there's a whole bunch of
stuff out here well one that i don't
have right now is techcrunch
so what i can do is i can say you know
what
i'm going to create a techcrunch one so
i'm going to go back over here
and this is the feed
so i can just copy this link
and i'm going to put that right into the
feed link
and if i look at this in like chrome for
example
i'm going to see it probably through
feed burner oh no this one actually
isn't a feed burner so this is a raw
feed so this is what
you're normally going to see it's a raw
xml article feed
everybody's is
there's some core stuff but some include
more information than others so not all
of this is brought in to the um
the rss reader but stuff that's useful
for the most part is
so arch technica i'm just going to say
for the description i'm going to
actually use theirs now here you can
actually see they actually tell you how
often you're going to see stuff so you
know 11 posts a day on ours technical is
your average
i'm going to make that my description
uh i will clean this up a little bit
that'll work
uh we'll leave that there and this is
gonna be
techcrunch
and then actually what i can do
is
because i'm
me i'm gonna take
oh
sorry i grabbed the wrong one
so if i come in here
and
do that there we go
and we're going to put it
and i'm actually going to take that
image
i'm just going to save it to my
downloads folder
and then i'm going to upload it and so
i'm going to actually use theirs which
with most of these i'm
until this is a paid app i'm not going
to be too worried about it but typically
i'm assuming you can sort of use that
because it is identifying it as their
stuff
everything and you will see so if i do
add feed
i'm going to have that now in my
description and that thing has not i
don't have access to that for some
reason
so something broken in that link but
you can see now i've got techcrunch
and it's going to show up
i don't have any articles yet but once
it does
anywhere i see an article
we do you know we give
proper credit so you're going to see
what feed
those things come from and this is named
off of
this comes from the feeds actual name
now note that there is no way to edit a
feed for users
at this point there's no way to edit
that uh once you've got one in there
other than you can subscribe and
unsubscribe so as we
grow
uh that's gonna be one of the things
that's gonna be you know looked into is
making sure that an artic that a feed
brings articles in
uh that they're readable because there's
some cases where the it's broken html
that just doesn't
it does not bode well for
for example
doing this uh you know on the primary
reading although most of them
if i go in and read the article
in most cases that's gonna it may not be
pretty but it's at least readable
you