When Google killed its RSS-star, Google Reader, many of us scrambled for a replacement.  Why? Because RSS is open, free, and handier than a pocket on a shirt.  It is also one of those mysterious tools that separate the geeks from the norms.  I am truly puzzled by its relative obscurity.

Anyway…I went through a lot of blind dates and subsequent disappointments. Then I found Inoreader.  It was free and was just as good as Google Reader from the beginning. In fact it’s developer, Yordan Yordanov, was hella busy improving it to the point where I would switched over to it even if Reader had not had its plugged pulled.

Yordanov and his team are without doubt the best support crew out there.  That’s why I did the unthinkable–I paid for a professional plan.  I am glad I did.  Inoreader has continued to improve so quickly and so usefully that I can’t keep up with the improvements.

My Chicago buddy, Dan Bassill, is a true polymath and is always interested in finding ways to push information from his extraordinary non-profit site, the Tutor/Mentor Exchange (T/ME).  Dan wanted to know how he could use Inoreader to seek, make sense of and share with individuals and groups throughout the world his purpose:

It took Thomas Edison more than 1000 tries before he invented a working light bulb. It will take extensive learning, innovation and effort to build strategies that reach youth in all poverty neighborhoods with programs that help more move successfully from birth to work.

Here’s what I want to show Dan and anyone else: the products that Inoreader can create and a way into doing that yourself.

Inoreader allows you to vacuum up any site that has an rss feed.  Once you have gathered up a few sources that fit together, you can begin to share them with others in lots of ways.

The first way is as an RSS feed itself.  I put some of Tutor/Mentor Exchanges feeds into a folder and took it from there. Here is the RSS link to a growing list of resources all connected to T/ME.

Anyone can copy that link and put it into their own feed reader, not just Inoreader. But wait there’s more. What if I wanted to share this feed on my blog? There are several options.  For example, we could make what Inoreader calls an Html Clip.

One of the most amazing aspects of Inoreader is that almost every tool for sharing can be customized. In the example above I adjusted the number of articles above. You can change font size, color, blahdiblahblah. Click inside the embed box and scroll down.  As I add more feeds to this particular clip it will refresh with them as well.

Or perhaps you want to create a Bundle.  With bundles you can adjust the order in which the blogs will be read, add your own custom icon, and remove any feed items you don’t want.  Unfortunately, there is no embed function, but I can use embed.ly to do that.

#Tutor/Mentor Exchange bundle on Inoreader

 

 

I just love doing this kind of work with online friends. It is profoundly satisfying. I invite you to take a look as this short tutorial on Vialogues and to ask more questions there that I can answer here.

Here is the Vialogue  of a screencast tutorial I did for Dan. You can join in just by signing up for a free account.