My Experience Using Feedly
I love astronomy. I am a huge astronomy nerd and I like to keep with the latest developments in the field. However, with the busy lifestyle I lead of being a full time student, working part time, running my own photography business, and participating in extracurriculars… I don’t have much time to spend searching the internet for the latest news.
I tried to work around this problem by following some of the top news source for astronomy such as NASA and Universe Today on social media, but their posts tend to get cluttered with everything else in my newsfeed.
So when I saw that one of the assignments for a course (EID 100) I’m currently taking is to use an aggregator software to collect information on a field of choice, I immediately used it for astronomy. This is the perfect time and opportunity for me to catch up on the latest developments in astronomy, especially since I’m taking an astronomy course right now too.
I chose Feedly to complete this assignment. Feedly has a web version, desktop app version and also apps for iOS and Android. I tried Feedly on the web version as well as the app for my iOS phone. I didn’t use the desktop app version because I don’t like downloading apps on my computer.
Let’s start with my web experience first. To sign up for Feedly, you can create a new account or use your Facebook, Google, Twitter, Windows, Evernote, or Enterprise login. Once logged in, visits to feedly.com will automatically take you to your dashboard. For me it looks like this:
As you can see, I have already created a feed for astronomy and that’s the only feed I currently have. The Today tab gives you an overview of the latest news in all the feeds you’ve created, but since I only have one feed, I only see astronomy related news. If you have multiple feeds, you’ll see a mixture of content here.
Creating a new feed is really easy too. Just click on the green Add Content button at the bottom of the page and choose Follow Publications & Blogs to take you to this page:
When you follow a new source, you can either add it to an existing feed or create a new one.
I really like how you can see every source that you’ve followed under each feed. This is useful for when I only want to see the articles from a specific source, say NASA for example.
When you click on an article, it takes you to a page where you can save the article, add notes to it, share it on Twitter, or just go to the website where the article is hosted, etc. I like this feature because it allows you to do so many actions on a single page.
Now moving on to my mobile app experience with Feedly. Much of layout on the app is similar to the web version, however there’s a different feel to it. The app feels more like flipping through a magazine than simply looking at a RSS feed.
This was the Today page looks like on the mobile app and how it looks and feels when you swipe to the articles:
I definitely like the feel of the mobile app more than the web version. I feel I can get easily immersed in the app.
As I said before, the layout of the app is actually pretty similar to the web version. Opening the left side tap gives you the option to look at all feeds, one feed, the sources for the feed, and add new content.
So now user experience aside, did I actually learn anything new about astronomy using Feedly? The short answer is, yes I did.
I learned that there are now new clues to what the compositions and atmospheres are like for planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. I learned how a new technique could boost gravitational-wave detection and kept up to date with what the Voyager spacecrafts are up to.
However, not everything is all that peachy. There are some things I didn’t like from my experience with Feedly. I wish there was a more rigorous filtering system because I would get articles about unscientific but space related topics like Star Wars. Now I absolutely love Star Wars but I came here to read up on astronomy, not entertainment.
I guess this is a bit out of Feedly’s control, but if they can somehow look at the keywords that are tagged in the articles and filter using that… but that would also require authors of these articles to actually tag it. Hopefully someone somewhere will come up with a solution to solve this problem!