My feed reader died back in 2013 like everyone else’s. After Google Reader, I tried Feedly and a couple other services but never really settled in. Twitter eventually filled the void, but the problem is that it never stopped pouring. The demise of Google Reader left me drowning in social media.
I killed Facebook as a New Year’s resolution in 2016 — the only one I’ve ever successfully kept — and now I’m trying to take a step back from Twitter by using Safari’s Shared Links feature. I think I would have discovered this feature earlier if it weren’t so poorly named. I have no idea what “shared links” is supposed to mean in light of what the feature does. I’m trying to keep up with pages or posts, not links, and neither I nor the authors have shared them.
The name aside, using Shared Links is simple. Just navigate to a favorite site, click the share button, and select Add Website to Shared Links.
Do the same thing with as many sites as you would like to keep up with, and then click View, Show Shared Links Sidebar (command + shift + 3) to see a list of the most recent posts from these sites.
To view your feed on an iOS device, select the little book icon and the @ symbol.
Adding sites to Shared Links on an iOS device is a little different. Once you are on a site you want to follow, do this:
- Click the book icon.
- Click the @ symbol.
- Click
Subscriptionsat the bottom of your list of posts. - Click
Add Current Site.
I like reading posts as they appear on the actual websites to which they belong, and navigating to a post via your Shared Links feed allows you to do this.
One other cool feature: After you finish reading a post, there is an UP NEXT banner at the bottom of the screen that allows you to scroll down and go straight to the next post in your feed.
You can check out iMore for their intro to Shared Links.
Also, Brian Renshaw has other ways of keeping up with sites, but I prefer to just use Safari.
Brian W. Davidson 