Reading the days news

Almost every work day I have a routine where I try to stay up to date with the world through the paper, Twitter, and of course Hacker News for the nerdy stuff. Of course, all of these sites can be time-consuming and just staying up to date with these three could take hours a day. Here are a few bookmarks I use to cut the daily reading process down to a few minutes.

• The local paper – I subscribed to the printed local paper a few months ago and I start my mornings going through it. I live in a small city and it typically has two or three local stories and the rest are sourced from AP or another establishment. I just read the local stories, pass the comics to the kids, and skip the rest.
• Alternate Hacker News – A chronologic list of items that have made it onto the Hacker News homepage. This makes it easy to quickly scan and see if anything interests you.
• NYT Today’s Paper – The New York Times updates their homepage many times throughout the day and all their social channels constantly push out new articles. It’s overwhelming, but they offer a web app that gives you all the stories from today’s paper which means it was the important news from yesterday.
• Real Twitter – I’m not sure where I found this but it’s a search that filters the stream and removes replies and only shows people you follow. It makes scanning your timeline easier than the default.
• Feedbin – This is my RSS reader of choice but it goes even further because you can subscribe to newsletters and even Tweets for specific people. I have a few people that I follow where I want to see every tweet they make and with this setup I can see it right in my RSS reader.
• Nuzzel –  This service sends me a daily email with all the links the people I follow on social media share. It’s nice to not have to worry about looking at the Twitter firehose, but you do miss out on any commentary they may have shared with the link.

Those are all the sites and services I use throughout the day and maybe some of these are new to you and could help you save time in your consumption habits.