When we announced our v13 update, we mentioned a new feature called Email Digests that we’ll explain further in this post.

This feature allows you to share your curated articles with your friends or colleagues who may not be familiar with RSS but have a keen interest in the topics you’re following. Or you can simply send yourself a summary of your favorite topics once per day instead of checking in on your feeds every hour.

Setting up an Email Digest will allow you to automatically send an email summary of all new articles from a chosen source – folder or tag, for example. By setting up a predefined period you will be able to choose precisely when the digest will be emailed to your recipients.

How to create an Email Digest?

Digests are easy and intuitive to create. You can reach this feature by going to Preferences and select Email digests under the Collaboration section. This will take you to the feature page.

When creating a new Email Digest, you will be able to customize the name, add recipients, select your source and schedule. You can also write a summary message that will appear on top of every email.

Once you have saved your Email Digest, your recipients will be notified by email and asked to accept the subscription. After a recipient has subscribed, they will begin receiving Email Digests at the designated schedule period.

Recipients can choose to unsubscribe from these digests at any point in time by simply scrolling down to the bottom of the email digest and clicking the Unsubscribe link.

Digest overview

Below you can see what an example of an Email digest looks like:

Email digests are available now for all Pro and Team users. If you’re new to Inoreader and would like to try out our new feature, then be sure to sign up and activate your free 14-Day trial.

Everyone is concerned as the novel Coronavirus spreads at rapid rates across all countries of the world. We believe every organization that can help in one way or another should do it and not just stand by. That’s why the Inoreader team gathered together (on a Skype call, we are all home-office) and brainstormed something that will hopefully prove useful to everyone who seeks near-realtime alerts for local situation.

We have combined 3 of our best Pro features together for a custom solution that will keep you updated about new cases in your region, new measures from local government bodies, and other critical updates. To begin just click the new orange notification in the sidebar:

Alternatively, if you close the notification, you can still add COVID-19 alerts from the + button:

By combining Active Search, Global Search, and Rules, we will provide you with updates in a special tag in your Inoreader account and as a push notification on your mobile phone. We have handpicked trusted sources for each country, so you don’t have to scramble for those.

This COVID-19 local alerting system will be available to all users for FREE during the Coronavirus outbreak.

We are now monitoring 70+ countries! Thanks to everyone who suggested their country to be added and provided good and trusted local sources!

We need your help to expand the list of countries. If you live in a country that is not listed, let us know by using our contact form.

Stay safe from the Coronavirus. It’s not a joke! Follow those tips to avoid the infection and spreading it to others:

• Stay at home if possible. If outside, always keep at least 2 meters (6ft) distance to others.
• Wash your hands with soap for at least 20 seconds
• Avoid touching objects outside and especially avoid touching your face. Use a disinfectant if you touched unclean surfaces, money, etc.
• If you have a face mask, wear it when you enter public indoors spaces. It protects others too.
• If you have symptoms, first call your doctor and do not go for an unannounced visit.

Best from the Inoreader team.

Have you ever tried to convince somebody to start using an RSS reader, only to hear back from them something like “I don’t know where to start” or “Can you help me find some good sites to follow?”. Even we, as the developers of Inoreader, struggle with that sometimes.

That’s why we developed this new feature. You can now invite your friends and help them start right away by sharing your best collection of feeds. When they sign up, they will be presented with a choice to immediately subscribe to the feeds you selected for them. They will even be organized into folders, just like your feeds.

To begin, open the Profile menu and select Invite friends:

Then enter the email address of your friend. Don’t worry, they can choose to sign up with a different email, and the invitation will still work. It’s also possible to invite multiple people by separating their emails with a comma. You can optionally (though we highly suggest you do) select some of your feeds to help them get started and then hit Send.

Your friend will receive an email with a link. When they click it, they will only need to sign up and voila! They will start with a new Inoreader account, automatically subscribed to your selection of feeds, so they won’t have to scramble to find them on their own. We hope this new feature will help you get more of your friends into RSS with minimal effort.

Ever since we launched our Free COVID-19 Alerting System, we’ve been continuously asked how we made it. In this blog post, you will not only read how we did that, but you’ll also learn how to achieve the same result (and even more) for any topic.

A little history.

See, the people who created Inoreader worked previously on different kinds of monitoring systems (Telco, environment, etc.), so monitoring and alerting was always at our hearts. Ever since we launched Inoreader in 2013, we wanted to harness the power of RSS for monitoring and alerting, not just content consumption. That’s why Active Search and Rules were amongst our first Pro features. Those two features are at the core of the Free COVID-19 Alerting System too, although we made a custom solution, so it’s easier to use and also free because we want everyone to be able to use it in those tough times.

When the World Health Organization characterized COVID-19 as pandemic, and we saw the number of cases around the world skyrocket, we knew we had to do something and not just stand by. We are not a healthcare or manufacturing organization, so we couldn’t directly help fight the virus, but we deal with information and, more importantly, with real-time information. We also have the necessary tools to deliver this information in the form of instant push notifications.

So an idea was quickly born. We will create an alerting system for people to quickly learn about new cases and other important information such as quarantined cities, closed roads, and others in their local area. And it should be free for everyone. Less than a day later, we launched the alert system with 20 countries, and in the following days, we continuously expanded the list. As of today, we monitor 90+ countries with local news in their native language.

So here’s how we did it.

We created a special Inoreader user account. We called it the donor. We created folders for countries and then added a list of trusted news feeds for each country. We manually reviewed each folder to check if there’s not much duplication of stories. We then started looking for patterns to find the right terms until we were only able to see headlines worthy for notifications. After a few hours, we compiled a good list of keywords, so it was time for the first real step – creating an Active Search for each country.

Each Active Search creates its own, filtered stream of articles, which is updated as soon as new stories arrive if they match our advanced search term. Here’s our actual search term in English:

(corona* OR covid*) AND (case OR cases OR measures OR breaking OR
confirmed OR closing OR closed OR emergency OR declar* OR
quarantine* OR government OR recover* OR heal*)

At this stage, things were already starting to shape up. The next phase was to add rules that can trigger some actions. For this, we had to build a custom UI dialog and some backend logic to create the rules because obviously, we couldn’t let users use the donor account directly. Here’s the dialog:

When you click Subscribe, we create a custom rule, just for you, which does two things. It saves new articles in a special tag in your account, and optionally it sends you push notifications to alert you.

This way, we were able to drastically cut down on development time for a new feature by just reusing our already powerful feature set and hooking up some custom logic around it. It took us just several hours to have a working proof of concept, and after a few polishing touches, we launched the alerting system publicly. It took us less than a day, from idea to realization. Today, just a week after launch, more than 15,000 people already subscribed to free COVID-19 alerts, and we are continuing to add new countries to the list and tweaking the search terms for better results.

How to build your own alerting system?

Now, to the meat of the blog post! If you’ve read the above, you probably already have an idea on how to achieve the same result for any topic. We’ll try to cover that in detail here.

To use this, you will need a Pro account. You can see our pricing here. Don’t forget that we have a fully functional 14-day trial so you can test it out first.

Step 1: Find good sources

You can also skip this step if you want to use our Global Search, which lets you search and monitor our complete database of public articles. Just be warned that it may become noisy, so you will have to use more specific search terms. If you want to monitor local news only, it’s always better to curate your sources first, like in this step.

Start by subscribing to some trusted media sources:

Search by name or directly subscribe if you know the RSS URL of the feed. In this case, we’ll subscribe to several German news sites, like SPIEGEL ONLINE and DW.

Next, group all feeds into a single folder. If you don’t know how to create a folder, right click on any of the feeds and choose “Assign to new folder”.

A prompt will appear to choose a name for your folder. When you save it, you can simply drag and drop the other feeds into it, until they are all grouped.

Step 2: Create an Active Search to collect articles

The next step is to open the folder and click on the Search bar. Then enter your search term. It can be a simple term or a complex one. Our search engine supports very advanced queries like this one:

("include this phrase" OR this OR thi*) AND (more OR terms) AND -notthis

If you want to search in our whole database, click on the GLOBAL tab. Just beware that you will probably get lots of results, and you’ll need to adjust your search terms so you don’t get flooded.

In the screenshot above, we are searching for all article with titles containing corona*, but also at least one of our 3 other terms – fälle (cases), maßnahmen (actions) and schließen (closing), because we are not really interested in all news that match corona*. Be sure to switch to Advanced syntax if you want to use a boolean search. Depending on the number of results, you might want to search in titles only or in both titles or content. The latter will give you more results, but can also be less precise. When you are happy with the results, just click “Subscribe to topic”.

A new section called “Active searches” will appear in your sidebar. You can choose to rename your searches by right-clicking on them because by default, they will be labeled as your search terms.

Congrats! You now have a fully working Active Search that will collect new articles matching your search terms. You can browse them at your leisure, but you can now also set up alerts via push notifications or email with the help of another Inoreader Pro feature – Rules.

Step 3: Set up alerts

Now comes the fun part – making Inoreader beep your phone.

First, you will need to get our application for Android or iOS. Then you need to create a simple rule that will match all new articles inside this Active Search and push them to your phone. Start by right-clicking on the newly created Active Search and selecting “Create rule”:

A dialog will open that will allow you to configure your rule. Give it a short descriptive name and click on “New action”. Leave the “If” conditions empty for this rule, unless you want to filter articles here additionally. Then from the drop-down, choose “Push mobile notification”. Optionally add a prefix that will be added to each notification. This can be helpful if you have many rules and you want to know which one is sending you a notification:

Save the rule, and you are practically ready. Congrats! You can later access your rules by going to Preferences (from the profile menu at the top right corner of the screen):

You will soon start receiving notifications on your phone like these:

Summary

You can use Inoreader’s automation features like Active Search and Rules to create powerful monitoring and alerting systems on any topic. You can, for example, get alerts on forest fires, earthquakes, and other natural disasters in your area. You can also get alerts on new deals on classified sites or even for new TV show episodes. It’s all up to you.

So, you wanted to follow this nice website for new content, but it doesn’t have an RSS feed yet? Don’t worry, because Inoreader got you covered, again!

Introducing Web feeds

Whenever you see a web page with a series of updates, be it news articles, blog posts, classifieds, product updates, weather alerts, practically any series of HTML links, Inoreader should be able to present it as an RSS feed. This feed will then be continuously updated, and any new links added to the list will pop up as articles inside Inoreader. Just like any regular feed.

You can then do all the regular good stuff that you do with feeds – group them into folders, read them on the go with offline folders, apply rules and filters.

How to use Web feeds

Paste the URL of the web page in our search bar and press Enter, just like you subscribe to regular RSS feeds via URL. If Inoreader doesn’t discover an RSS feed, you will be presented with a new screen:

Click the button to start our new Web feeds tool. It will try to find the best series of links automatically and will present you with up to 3 sample feeds. If you like what you see, you can simply click the “Subscribe” button at the bottom of the appropriate list.

There will be cases where our parser will not be able to discover your feed automatically. You could also want to follow a specific section of the page. Click the Manual Setup tab if that’s the case. Here, you will be presented with a rendering of the web page. Some sites have optimized mobile versions. You can toggle Mobile view to try if it works better. Then find the section of the web page that you want to follow and click on a sample link to train our parser. The other links in the same group will be highlighted, and on the left, you will find the detected feeds.

Click on a feed to preview and subscribe to it. You can also enter your own XPath or CSS selectors. Handy if you are already using a similar system, and you want to import your old parsing rules.

Enjoy your new Web feed!

Web feeds are now available in our Pro plan. You can start a Free 14-day Pro trial to try and see if this feature works for you.

Did you know you can subscribe to YouTube channels and playlist in Inoreader? Simply paste the URL of the channel or playlist, and Inoreader will automatically generate an RSS feed for that.

However, if you are subscribed to hundreds of channels on YouTube, until now, it was a frustrating experience to keep them synchronized with your Inoreader subscriptions. Not anymore!

Today, we are launching our new feature that will help you achieve that effortlessly. To begin, just open Inoreader’s Preferences and go to Share, Save & Login section. Scroll down to YouTube and simply connect your account. Inoreader will automatically create a folder called YouTube Subscriptions, and you will find all your YouTube channels automatically subscribed there.

Now, whenever you subscribe to some new channel directly on YouTube, It will be automatically added to your Inoreader too. Unsubscribed channels will also be removed from your Inoreader.

Because of the very strict YouTube Data API quota limits, this happens only a few times per day, so you might need to wait a few hours for the automated process. For the same reason, this feature is available in our Pro plan only.

If you struggle to keep your YouTube in sync with your RSS reader, this could be your solution.