What I Use: RSS

I encourage people to subscribe to my site via RSS, when mentioning I have a site on the Facebooks and Twitters and similar. This may seem a little archaic (that is so 2008), but honestly RSS is still one of my go-to solutions for finding worthwhile things to read, watch, or experience.

One of the big reasons you don’t really see RSS mentioned anymore (despite folks actually using it often, without realizing it… looking at you, podcasts) is because Google stupidly shut down Google Reader, which was the de facto standard for reading your feeds. That killed a lot of momentum for its use.

While RSS may be limping along, it’s not dead, and a lot of sites actually do have RSS feeds, still — they just aren’t as prominently noted or advertised or linked anywhere.

Of course, even if you do decide to use RSS, there’s still the hurdle of finding an RSS reader you actually like. A lot of folks go with a web-based option (ala Google Reader), so they can read on whatever device they happen to be on. There’s also some pretty nice apps for sale (for instance, NetNewsWire), if you’re so inclined, and a lot of RSS-adjacent apps (like several web browsers, and even Apple Mail) are available as well. Personally, I use Vienna RSS, which is an open source project made for macOS. I’ve tried a bunch of other apps and methods, and this is the one I keep coming back to (there was a gap where development wasn’t really happening much, so I looked around a fair bit, but regular updates are happening again). It’s fairly fast, robust, and seems to handle a ton of feeds well. If you’re looking for a reader, I’d say it’s worth a try.

I recently went through and cleaned up my RSS feeds, getting rid of dead feeds. I just want to say, to all those bloggers who have continued to post after the blogging fad wore off: I salute you, and I’m still reading.