One of the most convenient ways to obtain information is, undoubtedly, the use of RSS technology. Special programs and services - RSS readers - give us the opportunity to receive news from different sources in one place without visiting many sites. The best of these services is Google Reader, which is still an unattainable example for competitors. However, the appearance of the new RSS reader NewsBlur can change the usual picture, because it is not only a convenient web application, but also smart.
To start using the service, you will need to register. You can do this in the usual way - by specifying a user name and password, or importing your data from Google Reader. Then you need to add subscriptions manually by downloading the OPML file or moving feeds from Google Reader. Please note that for free use, you can add up to 64 channels.
NewsBlur meets us with a nice and comfortable design and a lot of not yet understandable controls and indicators. The main window consists of three panels: the left one displays a list of your subscriptions organized in folders; the second panel shows the names of the articles; the third displays their contents. The layout of the panels, sorting order of the feeds and many other options can be easily changed in the settings. The contents of the articles can be displayed in one of three types - Original, Feed, Story, switching between them is done using special buttons.
Now we turn to the most interesting features of NewsBlur. This reader after a short training can highlight interesting news for you and filter out unnecessary. To do this, you need to specify topics and authors of interest to you, highlighting them in a special window or directly in the headings of articles. In addition, you can specify even words in the headings of articles, which the program needs to pay attention to. The necessary elements are highlighted in green, and those that you would like to hide are highlighted in red.
After you do these operations, the reader can visually display the amount of interesting news in each feed and hide the topics you do not need. Using the slider in the lower left corner, you can toggle the display mode: hide the screened (red) - show all (yellow) - only interesting (green). Thus, after a short workout, you can stop wasting time on manually filtering the news flow - for you it will automatically do the program.
The online application NewsBlur is not only a convenient shell for comfortable news reading, but also tries to solve the biggest modern problem - the overflow with information flows. Thanks to the clever mechanism of recognition of important articles for you, you can hide all unnecessary one-way traffic and do not waste your precious time reading hundreds of headlines that you do not need.
