Inoreader Rules

---

Summer 2020 Blog Fest

---

Rules for tags. The reason I pay for the "pro" version of Inoreader is so that I can create rules that assign tags to incoming content automatically. You can get a lot of use out of Inoreader tags by just assigning them manually, but when you can assign tags to all incoming content with rules, that is a big help in organizing that content.

In the case of my classes, I have about 100 students every semester, and they are usually writing several blog posts each week, which means hundreds of incoming blog posts. Thinking about it like email: if you use rules and filters in your email, you will probably find it worthwhile to get an Inoreader pro account (currently $50/year). With a Pro account, you can create up to 30 different rules, along with many other features such as active searches, that can help you manage large amounts of incoming content.

Creating rules to assign tags. You can access the Rules through the Preferences. Here's what the interface looks like for creating rules: it is extremely powerful! You can define multiple trigger conditions, and also multiple actions if the trigger conditions are satisfied:

So, for example, you can have Inoreader assign tags to incoming content based on keywords in a specific folder and with keywords in the item title. That's the approach I take with my classes. I ask students to include specific words in their blog post titles, and rules assign those posts to different tag streams which I can then read and review by assignment. I can also make manual adjustments, adding the tag manually if the student forgot to include the keyword in the title.

Other rule actions. This screenshot shows the different actions that you can use in rules. The ones I use are to assign tags (sometimes assigning multiple tags in a single rule) and also to mark-as-read, but perhaps you will see some other rule options here that would be useful to you:

For example, if you want to mark student work in Google Drive, I can imagine that would be a useful rule action.

IFTTT and Inoreader. Another way to automate your Inoreader workflow is by using the service IFTTT. Inoreader is one of the services that you can add to IFTTT recipes: IFTTT - Inoreader.

I've used IFTTT to automatically repost content to a Blogger blog, and that worked really well. I have not explored any of these other IFTTT options, but it can definitely be a powerful tool!

So, those are some thoughts about automating your Inoreader experience. Next up: Inoreader Export: HTML Clippings (Folders).