Beyond the introduction.
Inputs
Feeds
Groups
Filters
Deletion detection
Actions
Outputs
Transformations
Firehose
Output feeds
Search
Notes
Permalinks
Low footprint
Hotkeys
API
Feeds have one or more inputs: sources which bring in content from a wide variety of integrations.
Bring in any RSS, RSS v2, or Atom feed. Choose from millions of options that are already available in these well-known formats.
On top of adding your choices from the web, we maintain a large catalog of interesting feeds to make it easy to discover and add them.
Not sure if a site has feeds? Plug a URL into our feed finder, and we'll try to figure it out. If we find any, you can load up a preview and decide if it looks good to add.
Adding an email input creates a unique address you can use from any device to add new items to a feed.
It will look like this:
xjuakv1f4w7rpn3sckfqve@example.com
When you send in an email, you can add any prefix you like, up to 32 more characters. We'll ignore those.
So, you could add an email address like this to your contacts:
readlater-xjuakv1f4w7rpn3sckfqve@example.com
And, as you're viewing something on your phone, you could "share via email", type "readlater", and it will autocomplete the rest. This is a painless way to add items from virtually any device.
You can use these to subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters and filter the incoming items, only including ones you're interested in. There are a lot of possibilities.
With each GitHub option, you can quickly triage recent activity or add filters so that you only see when specific keywords (or regex) are mentioned. You can also include or exclude certain types of events altogether.
Filters are invaluable if you're responsible for a certain area of a busy repo or involved in a lot of projects. You can view the relevant changes and comments only, you won't have to rely on people tagging you (if they ever do), and you can organize and batch tasks by having many different views of the same repo.
Track your private and public Pinboard bookmarks. Create separate inputs based on different Pinboard tags or title/description filters in Yupdates.
Set up a workflow where you bookmark things from all your other apps and devices and then triage in Yupdates. Organize your research, speed up newsletter curation, POST items to your own workflows, or keep a convenient, ongoing backup.
Track subscribers and unsubscribers in near-realtime.
Get a sense of the daily activity, filter for specific domain names and important email addresses, POST items to your own workflows, or keep a convenient, ongoing backup.
We made adding items through the API simple so that you can integrate with almost anything from anywhere.
For adding items, there's a dedicated token per input. This means you make just one configuration, and Yupdates figures out the rest.
It also means there's only one permission to reason about: the token is authorized to add items to one, single feed, and do nothing else. It can't even read items. You're not dropping your master key into a cronjob script or Lambda or wherever it's going to run.
And it only takes a few lines of code. You can see a complete example in the FAQ.
This works well from a cron job or Lambda function set to run on a regular schedule. Call arbitrary APIs, scrape web pages, or send recurring business metrics and reports.
We have Python and Rust SDKs. See the API section of our FAQ for much more information.
What exactly is a feed?
Like with most RSS and email clients, feeds are presented as an ordered list of items with titles. You can click on them to read the full content of each item. (screenshot)
But feeds in Yupdates let you bring in content from many inputs. It could be 10 different RSS inputs mixed with 3 GitHub release notices mixed with items you sent in via email or API. Or it could be one RSS input only.
Your account is limited to a set number of inputs, not feeds, which lets you organize this in any way that works for the situation. For example, you might have 200 feeds with 1 input per feed or 20 feeds with 10 inputs per feed. In either case, 200 inputs are used.
Jump quickly to any feed at any timestamp.
It's a key part of browsing content: most of us like to bounce around. We often want the latest, but we also want to look back on things from a few months ago. Sometimes, we want to fly through hundreds of items to find that one thing where we forgot the name, but we'll definitely recognize it if we see it.
Read more on the performance page.
A lot of the preference settings are focused on feed viewing. Here are some highlights:
Judgment matters.
There are a number of products out there that let you configure responses to events with automated actions. These are great products, and they have a lot of nice integrations, but you don't have the ability to triage.
We believe there's an under-served way of working that is "half automated." There's a stream of information, notifications, events, and emails that you need to stop and think about, even if you only need a few seconds.
Is that post relevant to work? Is that an email I need to deal with? What tags should this have? Do I want to read that later? One of our dependencies has a new release—is there anything urgent? Is this GitHub issue assigned to the wrong person? Does this post about our product need a follow-up?
Automated systems are helpful, and Yupdates has a system for them: outputs. But actions let you make those decisions that only you can make. Once you do make a decision, triggering the action automates everything else that needs to happen.
Automate actions where it makes sense.
Finally, when you know every item in a feed should get the same treatment, you can configure outputs. You can think of these as actions, but they happen automatically to every item in the feed when the items arrive.