How Omnivore helped me build a reading habit

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#reading#learning
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Omnivore is a read-it-later tool. It allows to save articles you want to read or have already read, tag them, centralize newsletter subscriptions, and more. There are other such tools out there (Readwise seems to be another popular choice for instance), but this article focuses on Omnivore since that's the tool I picked (mostly because it's free, which makes it easy to have a try without wondering if a subscription will be worth it later down the road).

What problem does it solve

I never found a proper workflow around getting some reading in to hone my tech knowledge and get to know new things.

Most of the time, I only ended up reading when I was searching for a very specific topic. In such situations, it can get hard to find relevant sources. I also had nowhere to keep track of these relevant sources and articles for later use
When I found a blog I liked I ended up going through a few articles there knowing it would be unlikely for me to ever stumble there again.

Also, I had no external sources of knowledge, I'd only find out about what I was looking for.

Discovering newsletters

A while ago when starting my new role as a manager, I tried to find a few newsletters that could help me get to know the role better and learn how to do a good job at it.
I subscribed with my work email. Of course, the newsletters were lost in a lot of noise and more important emails. Also, my inbox is not a place I really enjoy and spending time reading there felt pretty odd.

As a result, I rarely ever read the newsletter posts I was receiving. Just a few, from time to time, enough to understand newsletters can be valuable but not enough to motivate me to read them more often.

Then I found out about TLDR.tech thanks to a team-mate. I found a lot of blog posts there, blog posts I wanted to save for later, when I would have time to read. I actually didn't subscribe to the newsletter but instead I was going directly on the website from time to time, often on my phone, when I had a few minutes available to browse. I ended up with a whole lot of open tabs that I could only access from my phone.
That's when I thought I had to setup a little something to synchronize this list across devices and de-clutter my browser

Moving to Omnivore

I found out about Omnivore and decided to have a try, I added all my existing reading list there, moved all my newsletter subscriptions there. I also added RSS feeds for the few blogs I knew I liked, in order to get notified whenever a new post is published.
Getting set up was pretty quick.

As a result, I now have a personal feed of:

I have enough subscriptions to fill-in the feed faster than I empty it, so I always have good reads at hand. I'm pretty satisfied with this setup.

Sharing what I read

As a bonus, Omnivore even allows me to archive reads I liked and tag them, so that I can find them easily if I ever want to share them with someone.

I thought making it public, thus sharing a curated list of posts I liked, could be relevant. I used Omnivore's graphQL API in order to get all my archived reads along with their labels.
You can find them in the In my mind page on my blog, I hope you'll like it. It's pretty bare-bones for now, but I have a few ideas for improvements if I'm ever motivated to spend more time on it.

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