Monday, January 19, 2026

Two Useful Tools of My Trade, and Maybe Yours

Over the span of several jobs/roles, I monitor -- and link to or otherwise make use of news stories, opinion pieces, and audio/video content from -- more than 200 sites on a daily basis. Over the years I've tried out a lot of tools to make my work easier.

Two important specifications: These tools need to be 1) web-based and 2) cross-platform with respect to the browsers I can access them from. At any given time I might be working from a Linux desktop PC, a Chromebook laptop, or even an Android phone.  With respect to daily workflow, I need to be able to move from my desk to a car to a hotel room and not be messing around porting content from one machine to another.

To find the content, I use InoReader (not an affiliate link). It's a web-based RSS client through which I follow the 99% of my source sites which maintain functioning RSS feeds (shame on the others, but a couple of them are important enough to manually visit as necessary).

To set aside the content for further use, I can't just choose one browser and make sure I keep it synced across all the devices I use. Some of my devices can't run some browsers.  Booky (not an affiliate link) lets me keep nicely categorized bookmarks all in one place on the web and accessible to me whether I'm using Microsoft Edge, Chromium, Chrome, Falkon, Brave, whatever. On any given day, there's a good chance I'll be using at least two of those five.

If your job involves 1) many web sites and 2) multiple computers, you may find both of those tools useful.

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