Managing Feeds using Backpack & Squeet

37signals' Backpack

Squeet.com

I've developed a way to manage, archive, and share your feed subscriptions using 37signals' Backpack software and RSS feed e-mail delivery service, Squeet.com.

Everyone knows that Backpack is a great personal information manager and it's uses are almost limitless. 37signals posted a great article about how to e-mail content to a Backpack page and I decided to look into this feature with a little more depth.

Currently, I use Squeet.com's RSS feed e-mail delivery service to manage almost 20 different blogs I enjoy reading. I find Squeet useful because I can manage these feeds a few different ways. I can schedule when I want feeds to be delivered to my inbox. This helps me manage my time effectively and set aside a part of each day for when feeds are sent to me and I can take the time to review everything. If I'm super-busy, Squeet will let me pause all delivery of feeds until I can set aside some time to look at things. An added perk for all you Google Desktop users is the ability to search Squeet's delivered RSS content that gets indexed along with all your other e-mails. For content providers, Squeet also offers publishing tools similar to FeedBurner.

What Squeet doesn't offer is a way to archive all this premium content being sent to your computer on an off-site location that you can access from anywhere. When I find myself searching for content that I want to share with someone (or recall for myself), it's hard to find if I'm looking in a place that isn't native to the way I personally archive content (bookmarks, notes, etc). This could mean not finding what you're looking for when relegated to searching a site's archives (being stuck on a friend's or co-worker's computer), so on and so forth. This is the problem that Backpack's versatility solves (with a few minor, personal reservations).

Once you've acquired a healthy stable of feeds (or just one, if you're using Backpack and Squeet for project-specific tasks) on Squeet, you're half-way home to creating a simple archive of your favorite web content. While in Backpack, create a new page that is solely for your Squeet feeds to be e-mailed to. On the bottom of this Backpack page, there will be a unique e-mail address assigned to it. Take note of this address and in Squeet's account section, change your existing e-mail address to the Backpack-assigned one. Squeet will send a confirmation e-mail to your backpack page. After confirming this e-mail address, you're good to go!

As previously mentioned, you can schedule when your feeds are sent or they can be sent as soon as they go live. Squeet re-sends feeds that have been updated by the author, but you can disable this option to cut down on any redundancy in this system. Essentially, you can create an endless amount of Backpack pages that have an endless amount of different feeds being e-mailed to it by Squeet. For every new Backpack page, use that e-mail address to create a new Squeet account. This way, you can neatly organize information about whichever current projects your working on, or just have an off-site way to archive your feeds while they are still being sent to your current e-mail address.

Interested in easily sharing feeds you read with your friends, colleagues, etc? Just share the Backpack page that your feeds are being sent to. I've sent up a small example here: http://jratlee.backpackit.com/pub/562323

This is where some small problems are encountered. Over the next few days, I'm going to examine how Squeet and Backpack handle individual posts e-mailed to the page (and you can too by frequenting the above Backpack page). However, right now, if I have Squeet send the feed via e-mail...it shows up in Backpack only with the title of the blog. If you need to search and archive, only having general information such as a name can be pretty counter-productive. On the plus side, the e-mails are obviously organized by date.

I hope you find this little hack useful to manage the sometimes overload of information that comes at you on a daily basis from subscribing to multiple feeds. Any comments, thoughts, improvements, criticism, etc. is always greatly appreciated.

Back To Top