Whether writing  a novel, news article or editiorial piece, as a writer you regularly need to “curate” content for future reference. Writers curate curate content, which is the process of gathering relevant ideas and content about a topic, and storing them for future use. In the process of writing you may need to quote a source or simply refer back to it when checking the accuracy of facts.

A great way to expedite and automate the curation task is to create a daily (or whatever frequency you choose) digest of reference material. Feedly in conjunction with Google Alerts, can do this. First you need to set up a Google Alert.

Google Alert Setup

  1.  If you do not already have one, create an account at Google.com.
  2. Sign in at google.com/alerts with your new or existing account.
  3.  Create a new alert

create google alertsEnter the term that you would like to receive notifications for when they’re mentioned across the internet.

Next change the ‘Delivery to’ field, to ‘Feed’.

Adjust the other fields to suit you, then click ‘Create alert’.

4. Click the ‘Feed’ link on the new alert and copy the link.

Feedly Setup

 

5. Now go to Feedly. Create an account if you have not already.

Logging in will put you on the page shown below.

feedly

6. In the search box, paste the link you copied in Step 4 above.

feedly2
Select “Google Alert –  ????” (in this case WordPress themes.

Congratulations. You now have your Google Alert formatted nicely for future use.

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