Why I Created Daily Feed Recycler

The motivation behind Daily Feed Recycler is that there is too much content on the Internet: good and bad. Once I found a good source, I do not have enough time to actually read everything. I just can’t read 5k word articles in a row. Even if I had the time to do it, I cannot mentally. It’s not fun.

Feeds are a wonderful tool for authors and readers. They allow to stay informed about the changes on a page. Feed aggregators are part of this reading experience. They let you manage feeds: read articles, mark as read, subscribe and aggregate feeds. Applications creating feeds get this for free and there are a multitude of feed aggregators available.

Feeds help with time problem to some extent, but they - wonderful as they are - have a dark side. Instead of solving the problem of organizing content in a way that you can read really good stuff, they organize content in a way that you can read the latest stuff. Yes, the new content is cool, but the classics are here to stay. You will not get a tweet from Goethe. With Daily Feed Recycler the good stuff is on an equal footing with the latest stuff. The content for every day is presented as new stuff in your feed aggregator.

Content has to be presented in a digestible manner. Deep reading, not just skimming to get an overview. Time and mental energy has to be organized in a way to allow reading. The Daily Feed Recycler is thought of as a way to break down content in smaller parts and add a reminder that there’s still good content to read. Using your feed aggregator you can decide when you read it, if you ignore it or if you read it at all. Feed aggregators are quite good nowadays and their flexibility is useful here.

You can now create your own channel of daily content: the full bash reference, the mayor Linux man pages or the list of all decision biases from Wikipedia. Everything you like. I’m often looking for daily feeds but there are not that many of them out there, because it’s a lot of work to do and depends on a certain level of expertise. Daily Feed Recycler is not a competitor for the existing curated daily feeds. A curated feed can have a much better quality through an expert selection and logical ordering of content.

Daily Feed Recycler follows the “Release early, Release often” philosophy. There are bugs, missing features and rough edges. I hope you find it useful nonetheless.