Most mornings, the news arrives as a pile: three push alerts, a newsletter you never open, and a feed built by someone else's priorities. A personal digest works differently. You pick the sources. You get one page. Ten minutes later you are finished, and nothing has shouted at you.

Building one is less work than it sounds. The parts are stable and boring — feeds, filters, a summariser — and they fit together in an afternoon. Here is the whole thing, in the order you should do it.

Start with sources you already read

Before you touch any software, list the places you actually rely on. Not the ones you feel you should read. Open your browser history for the past week and write down every site you visited more than twice. That list is usually shorter than people expect: a couple of newspapers, a trade publication, two or three writers, a city site, maybe one niche forum.

Aim for ten to twenty feeds at the start. Thirty is a habit. Fifty is a graveyard.

Find the feed address

Almost every publisher still offers a feed, even when it is hidden. Try these in order:

  1. Look for the orange or grey feed icon near the site's logo or in the footer.
  2. Add /feed, /rss, or /feed.xml to the end of the domain and see what loads.
  3. Open the page source and search for "application/rss+xml".
  4. If the site has none, run the homepage through a feed generator service, which converts a page into something you can subscribe to.

Newsletters count too. Many publish a feed version, or you can route them into your reader by giving each one a dedicated address.

Choose where the digest lives

You need one place that holds every source and remembers what you have read. Any of these will do:

  • A hosted reader. Fastest to set up, syncs across phone and laptop, and handles newsletters alongside feeds.
  • A self-hosted reader. More control, and nobody else deciding what your reader looks like. It needs a small server or a modest host and an hour of patience.
  • Your email inbox. An RSS-to-email service sends one daily message. Good if you want to leave apps alone, though the inbox gets crowded fast.

Pick one and stop shopping. A reader you open daily beats a better reader you set up and then abandon.

Turn twenty feeds into one briefing

The difference between a feed reader and a digest is editing. Without it, you have simply moved the noise somewhere new.

Sort sources into folders by attention level rather than by topic. "Read properly" for the three publications you respect, "skim" for everything else, "watch" for outlets that only occasionally matter. Then write rules. Filter sports scores out of a general news feed, hide anything with "sponsored" in the title, or push a specific author's posts to the top. Most readers support keyword filters, and the rules take minutes to set.

One more filter is worth adding: a limit. Read the digest once, in one sitting. Leave it open all day and you have rebuilt the scroll you were trying to escape.

Add summaries without losing the plot

A good summary tells you whether to read the piece. It is not a substitute for reading. Keep that distinction, or your digest becomes a wall of confident half-truths.

The simplest version: paste the article into a general-purpose assistant and ask for three sentences plus the numbers. Better, if your reader supports it, connect summarisation directly so long pieces arrive already shortened.

Requests that produce usable briefs

  • "Summarise this in three sentences, then list any figures, dates, or names I should remember."
  • "What is the claim, who makes it, and what evidence is offered?"
  • "Write one line on what changed since the last coverage of this story."

Two cautions. Summaries smooth over uncertainty, so keep the original one tap away for anything you might repeat or act on. And never let a condensed paragraph stand in for a primary document — a contract, a policy, a research paper. For anything with legal, medical, or financial consequences, speak to a qualified professional rather than relying on a shortened version. Your reader can surface the article; it cannot carry the responsibility for what you do with it.

Deliver it when you will actually read it

Timing matters more than format. Most people do well with one delivery: early morning, with coffee, before email. Others prefer an evening sweep once the day's noise has settled.

If you want the digest outside your reader, push it somewhere useful — a daily email, a note in a note-taking app, a short message to yourself. A setup that holds up well: have your reader export unread items once a day, pass them through a summariser, and append the result to a dated file. After a month you have a searchable record of what you followed, which is far more useful than a browser history.

Spend ten minutes a week pruning

Do this on the same day each week and it becomes routine rather than a chore.

  • Drop any feed that has not produced something worth reading in two weeks.
  • Check whether your filters are catching too much or too little.
  • Add one source you came across during the week — a writer, a local outlet, a specialist blog.

Keep the total steady. Adding without removing is how every good digest dies.

Build the small version first

Pick five feeds tonight. Read them tomorrow. If the digest held your attention, add ten more and switch on summarisation. If it did not, cut instead of adding. The point was never to read more news. It was to read the news you chose, finish it, and close the tab.

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