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With the impending demise of Google Reader I've been looking at ways to replace it.

I've decided that what might be cool is to get an email every morning, with all the updates from the last twenty-four hours, maybe in the style of a newspaper.

That's not a very original idea, since sites like http://fivefilters.org/pdf-newspaper/ and http://feedjournal.com/ already do this, but they both have various drawbacks. In particular both require a single feed, will just take the last n items, and clicking around on their website.

The Pro option for feedjournal seems almost like it would do the job, but the project seems to be dead, and there's no way to buy it.

Before I hack together something crazy I'd like to know if there's a better solution to my problem.

In short: I want to replace Google Reader with a daily pdf email, how should I do this?

edit: I didn't award the bounty because nobody solved the problem (not that I'm assuming it has a solution). Answers like "well for the way I do things this wouldn't work" aren't actually helpful, even if they are well-meaning.

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    you can use pipes.yahoo.com to join your feeds into a single one. (It can also email you - but not in pdf)
    – bdecaf
    May 29, 2013 at 8:48
  • @bdecaf thanks for that, I tried and got it working and it is as you describe, albeit slightly clunky
    – Sean D
    Jun 20, 2013 at 15:07

5 Answers 5

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First, it seems like you're putting a lot of effort into something that's ill suited to be a feed reader. I'm not trying to discourage you from using email to do it, my point is that it's very very difficult to render a variety of feeds in a very normalized and clean way. So consider using something that is very good at making feeds readable.

If you can get a TT-RSS instance going, it can be very simple to start sending a selection of some of your feed into a Pocket account, which does an outstanding job of making a feed beautiful and readable.

Take the feeds you want to forward and organize them under a single label, "Favorites" or something. Then, grab that feed url and add it to an ifttt.com account, where you tell it to forward all new feed items over to your Pocket account.

Alternately, you could use that feed url of your Favorites label and actually use one of the services you mention that will automatically generate a pdf from a feed.

Since TT-RSS is a feed publisher as well as a feed reader, your options are basically endless.

Also, if you really want to keep it simple, TT-RSS also can send you a daily digest email of selected feeds, with the added bonus that it will actually mark as read the items that it sent in the digest so that when you log into the web interface or use the android app or whatever, those items will no longer show up as unread.

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Awasu is a Windows desktop information aggregator (Atom/RSS and more via plugins).

Awasu can easily combine feeds together into a single output, which can be saved to a file, emailed or FTP'd. Awasu features a templating language so you can desing the output format to be any textural format such as an Atom/RSS feed, HTML, or some other XML format. Awasu provides a way for you to easily process this combined outout so you can transform it into a binary format such as PDF, ePUB, MOBI, etc.

Clearly, Awasu can do what you are asking for and a lot more, too much to list here, but from your question I'm unsure whether a Windows desktop application interests you.

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VeryPDF Online Tools look like it does what you want, although I haven't tried it.

The feature-list at Free Online RSS to Email Subscribe Device says :

  • Subscribe to feeds very easily.
  • Turn RSS to PDF
  • Check updates for feeds daily by default
  • Customize the email frequency options (real-time, every n-hours, daily…)
  • Choose to receive full text of each updates or only the title by email
  • Automatically analyze and list the feed URLs of a website
  • Group several posts into a email or get one email for one post
  • Specify the exact time to receive email
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  • seems to be vapour, nothing on the website and they didn't respond to email
    – Sean D
    Jun 28, 2013 at 3:45
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I too used to use Google Reader and I'm also one of those people that switched to using TT-RSS running on their own webserver.

I did briefly try several iPad and Android apps that render your RSS feed in a newspaper style but I gave up using them due to one major flaw with this concept - The length and format of articles is inconsistent and it destroys layout and feel, you end up just reading poorly formatted websites crammed in tiny columns where all the images are stripped out.

If you follow a really busy feed that has 100s of articles a day (The Register, Slashdot, etc) it utterly destroys the "newspaper" concept because there's too much content and it's all really short summaries. Or the RSS feed is the same as the content on the original website and so you end up with massive RSS articles that could run to many pages in a PDF.

Think of RSS as being more like email, rather than newspaper articles.

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Well, first, I wouldn't recommend to use a newspaper pdf to do what you want to do. I have something like 400 daily articles, and using an email client or even more a big pdf would make it totally unusable.

I would rather recommend to use a reader such as feedly, available for different browsers, android, ios, ... it imports in a single click all your google reader feeds and you can continue from here.

Moreover, it's totally compatible with the Google Reader API so you can continue to use service designed for it. For example, for what you want to do, you can use "if this then that", IFTTT, where you can automate actions, such as sending your feeds by email.

If you don't want to use this service, I would maybe use a service such as MailChimp, with only one subscriber ( you ;)) and their RSS newsletter service.

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