RSS FEED ICON
When you get stuck in a long line and have a few minutes to read your favorite Web sites, bringing out your iPhone is the perfect solution. Safari can read your sites but jeez it can be SLOOOW if the site is not optimized for the iPhone.
A better, faster way to read your sites in one fell swoop is to subscribe to the RSS news feed of the page. I use NewsGator’s service. Google has a similar service which is great as well, but I like having separate applications to handle these services.
Here’s the process for using NewsGator’s free feed service.
Create a user account on the NewsGator Web site. Then find some RSS feeds to add to your account. There are loads of sample feeds to choose from (New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, etc.) You can create different folders for entertainment, tech, news, etc.
If you can’t find your favorite site click on the RSS ICON. It appears in the URL field of Firefox or Safari. Clicking it will show you a link that reads “feed://” instead of “http://”. This feed can be manually entered into your NewsGator account if you can’t find your favorite sites. For instance… sometimes I’ll do a search on craigslist for a computer item. If I save the feed of that page and post it to my newsgator account it will show me when it’s updated with out me having to manually monitor the page. Nice!
Once you get your favorite feeds setup on the NewsGator page you have the option to download the “NetNewsWire” application for your Mac. It’s not absolutely necessary to use the desktop app as you can use the newsgator Web site instead. However, I love this program! Give it a whirl.
NETNEWSWIRE IPHONE SETUP
You will need NetNewsWire from the appstore. Great news… it’s FREE!
Once downloaded you must type in your user name and password. When you open the app it will download every news story, stripping out the ads and pretty much bring down only the text and a few pictures. It’s lean and mean for the iPhone and therefore quicker and more efficient than using Safari. Plus all read items get synced across both platforms. Once you start using it you won’t know how you got along without it.
