How I Curate Security Longreads

Today marks the 35th week of publishing the security longreads newsletter. I’m often asked how long it must take me to put the newsletter together each week. Amazingly, only about 15 minutes. Here is my process:

Finding Content

If you’ve ever heard me give a presentation, you’d probably ask how I keep up with the ever changing information security field. I read. A lot. I’ve created a master list of websites I trust to keep me up-to-date on the world around us. That’s all kept in Feedly. On the train to and from work each day, I go through Feedly looking for what is interesting to read.

Saving Content for Later

It’s not unusual for me to find a half dozen articles I want to read on the way into the office. All of those are tagged and automatically imported into Pocket. Pocket is a read it later service which downloads all of my saved articles to my tablet for later reading. For better or worse, Pocket has more than 100 articles in queue right now.

Reading

This is where the process breaks down. There are far too many good articles and too little time to read them. I have the best of intentions that I’m going to get to Why Everyone Seems to Have Cancer, a New York Times article from January 2014. (FYI, I commited reading bankruptcy last January, so this is the oldest article in the queue.)

I read on airplanes, before bed, at the lunch counter. Pocket makes it easy to have the latest (or oldest) articles already downloaded and ready to read. No internet necessary.

Curating the Security Longreads Newsletter

On Thursday nights, I sit down at my computer and open up the Pocket desktop app and review all of the content from the past 7 days. To publish the newsletter, I use a service called Goodbits. With a Chrome app, I bring up each article, load it into Goodbits and schedule to send it out at 10 am Central on Friday.

If you aren’t already a reader of the Security Longreads Newsletter, sign up here.