Feedly Tutorial

A few users have asked us about “how to best use feedly”. Here is a list of eight tips that we hope will help you optimize your feedly experience.

Tip #1 – Find and add your favorite sources | Click on the +add icon on the top right of the page to search for your favorite sources (by url, keyword or RSS feed) and add them to your feedly. Mark the sources you like the most as “must read”. If you are subscribing to a lot of sources, group them in categories.

Tip #2 – Define and re-order categories | The feedly “organize sources” page allow you to group sources in categories. You can also change the order of the categories in the navigation bar [Note: if you are a Google Reader user, please note that the changes you make to feedly will also be applied to Google Reader].

Tip #3 – Define your ‘must read’ sources | Feedly has the concept of must read sources. This is your way to influence how feedly filters your information stream and showcases featured articles. You can mark sources are must read in the add/edit subscription forms or in the “organize sources” page.

Tip #4 – Assign the right layout to each source | Feedly allows you to assign different views to each source. To do so, you can to drill down to the source page in feedly by clicking on the subscription name and in the header of the page you should see a view drop down which allows you to customize how you want feedly to display the content of that feed. You can use title only if you are a fast information scanner, grid if the source is very visual (example: Flickr, etc..).

Tip #5 – Learn about the keyboard shortcuts | For people who like to use keyboard to navigate around content, type ? in feedly to see the list of the keyboard shortcuts supported by feedly. My personal favorite if gg.

Tip #6 – Share/Participate | Everytime you bump into an article you find interesting, recommend it. This helps improve the quality of feedly for all other users. It also help feedly understand what sources and pieces of content you like most. If you have a twitter, facebook, tumblr or delicious account, you can also use the built-in sharing features to interact more actively with your communities and fuel interesting conversations.

Tip #7 – Spring Cleaning | Over time, your tastes will change, the quality of the sources your subscribe to will change. The feedly “organize sources” makes it easy to re-organize your content (drag and drop), rename things, delete sources and categories. [Note: if you are a Google Reader user, please note that the changes you make to feedly will also be applied to Google Reader]

Tip #8 – Other preference knobs | if you are power user, we also offer a set of preference knobs to help you customize some part of the feedly experience (see http://www.feedly.com/home#preferences).

Bonus Tip #1 | Feedly syncs its settings everytime you restart firefox or login. You can therefore install feedly and access it from multiple machines.

Bonus Tip #2 | Feedly is a dynamic project where we are constantly add, removing and fixing feature based on the feedback we are collecting on getsatisfaction/feedly and on twitter/@feedly.

If you just started to use feedly and have any questions, please ping @feedly or leave a comment here and we will add a Q&A section to this document.