Each year I often look at some of the tools I am using and review what I actually need and if I can save a little money. This year I tried to see if I can do without Feedly. I actually really like Feedly as a tool but I often find that I get busy and havent looked at it for a while because I forget its there. For me the problem is more to do with my personal workflow than any issue with the tool.

I was thinking it would be so much better if I could just get a teams message or email to tell me that there is a blog I might be interested in.

I already use Power Automate quite a bit so if I create a flow to do this then I can save around $100 per year or whatever feedly costs. There are lots of other features in Feedly but in my case I dont really need them so one less tool to worry about and a little cost saving reusing what I already have is a good thing to do.

Its pretty easy to implement a Power Automate to do this. I did the following.

  1. I started by creating a list in teams/sharepoint to hold a list of the blogs I want to keep an eye on. This makes it really easy to add a new blog to the list.
  2. I then make my flow read the list and loop over my list of blogs
  3. I then query the blog rss feed for the last 7 days and get a list of posts that have been published
  4. I then append to a string and build up an html formatted string with the list of blogs and their summary
  5. I finally send myself an email and a teams message

The result is once per week I get a list of content I might be interested in reading. I can make it more frequent if I want.

The flow looks like the below image

The key bits within the flow are:

Using the RSS connector, I pass in the url for the blog from the sharepoint list. Note I can also use this for checking the rss for a youtube channel too

The append to string shape is where I build the html formatted content which goes in my message body.

The net result is I get a handy weekly email with just enough information to help me see which blogs look interesting to read and I can now save my self $10 per month by cancelling Feedly which I havent really used enough to justify the cost.

Hopefully this simple little approach is useful for others. What kind of stuff can you automate to save yourself some time and money

 

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