Tag: RSS

RSS and how I use it

Based on some conversations after my last post, there was some curiosity about how I personally end up using RSS and what seems to work for me.

  • Start with an RSS reader that feels good to you. It’s not one size fits all, you may want a different experience than me. A lot of them are free (and most of the rest at least have a free trial) so there’s no harm in trying a few out. I’ve been using Vienna (which just celebrated 20 years of development).
  • Then start figuring out which sites or content you want coming your way. You can start with blogs you already read, and can see if any of the newsletters you’re part of might feel better as a feed. Then let it accumulate and keep adding as you bump into stuff around the internet.
  • It’s better to let your subscribed feeds build up naturally than it is to dive right into a firehose. Personally I don’t like leaving things unread, so I try to find a sweet spot where if I’m reading daily, it feels manageable in a reasonable amount of time.
  • While things come in chronologically, you don’t have to read them chronologically. There are some days where I’m just not in the mood for a longer, deeper post. It’s okay to punt and read those later.
  • Most people aren’t particularly prolific, so it’s generally fine to have more feeds than you’d otherwise expect.
  • That said, some folks ARE high volume. Like, Wil Wheaton posts regularly on his Tumblr. But they tend to be quick pithy things or sharing a quick picture or meme, so it’s like a quick palate cleanse to quickly scan through them. But when I got busy and didn’t read my feeds for a week, and I came back to 197 unread posts, I didn’t feel bad about just marking the entire feed as read. If I really want, I can always go back and read them later.
  • It’s your own personal feed collection. Don’t feel obligated to keep subscribed if you’re not enjoying the content. Especially if they tend to be high frequency, long content. If there’s not a compelling reason (the writing is exceptional, I know them personally and want to keep up with them, the topics they cover are interesting enough that it’s worth the slog), I just unsubscribe. I tend to keep the feed around, just disabled, in case I want to revisit it later.
  • Find a consistent time to go through your feeds. Some folks are morning readers. I tend to go through my feeds after work as sort of a wind-down. The point is to find a routine that works for you, as RSS works best (in my opinion) when it’s built into your day rather than an occasional afterthought. (Looping back to Molly’s newspaper metaphor, a newspaper works best when read daily, rather than letting a week or two build up to slog through all at once.)

Of course, your mileage may vary. RSS is a protocol and a tool, not a methodology or system – find what works best for you. Hope that helps!

RSS as Personal Newspaper

Over at Citation Needed, Molly White has a nice piece on how you can Curate your own newspaper with RSS. If you’re not reading Molly’s work already, you really should, especially if you care about what’s happening in the tech sector (mostly a mix of web3/crypto, and tech’s impacts on human rights and freedoms).

The basic gist is that RSS is a tried and true protocol that tons of services already have running but don’t do a great job of advertising, and it lets you read things at your pace, in an easily digestible, consistent format. I’ve been saying similar for ages, but I think she makes a more compelling argument for it, not the least of which being that it’s a lynchpin in how she gets her job done.

What if you could take all your favorite newsletters, ditch the data collection, and curate your own newspaper? It could include independent journalists, bloggers, mainstream media, worker-owned media collectives, and just about anyone else who publishes online. Even podcast episodes, videos from your favorite YouTube channels, and online forum posts could slot in, too. Only the stuff you want to see, all in one place, ready to read at your convenience. No email notifications interrupting your peace (unless you want them), no pressure to read articles immediately. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Molly White

I initially saw this article as a link in Blue Sky… but when I actually had a chance to read it, it was in my RSS reader.

RSS Rants

I’ve got a lot of RSS feeds in my feed reader. Some are dead feeds, some are prolific. If I don’t keep up, after about a week, I’ll come back to around 700 articles waiting.

The thing is, a lot of those articles are bad. Here’s why:

  1. RSS getting treated like a notification system. If all your RSS feed does is post a one-liner saying you’ve got an article up, you’re wasting my time and missing the point. It’s another delivery channel for your content. You wouldn’t sign up people for a newsletter where you just send a message saying “I’ve got a new post up. Go read it.” The same should apply to your RSS feed.
  2. RSS getting treated like an afterthought. Cool, you added some neat integration with some external service! Did you look to see what happens to those posts in your RSS feed? A lot of the time it’s literally a blank post. Other times it’s malformed junk missing any context of what’s supposed to be there.
  3. RSS getting misconfigured. There’s a lot of implementations of RSS feeds for different static site generators and blogging engines and CMS’s out there, but a lot of them feel like they were implemented so they could add “RSS support” to their checklist. As a result, you get blogs where every time they make a new post, every single post on their site gets marked as updated in RSS. In most of the cases I’ve bothered checking, basically the lastBuildDate is getting populated with the last date the site was built, rather than the last date that specific content was updated.

I keep hoping some of these folks will fix their systems and approaches, but I think I’m going to have to do a cull sometime soon. Depending on your RSS reader, some of this may be more noticeable than others, but for me, I’ve had enough.

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.

Link: Stop Using Facebook and start using your browser

Via Kottke.org, an article on Mashable about how we should stop relying on Facebook (and Twitter) to feed us content, and should try and go back to actually visiting sites that interest us. Get out of the algorithm for a hot second, for a variety of reasons — not the least of which being that you’ll (hopefully) get more diversity of thought on a wider variety of topics, rather than just what Facebook’s algorithm thinks you should see.

It’s definitely not simple, nor insignificant. By choosing to be a reader of websites whose voices and ideas you’re fundamentally interested in and care about, you’re taking control.

And by doing that, you’ll chip away at the incentive publishers have to create headlines and stories weaponized for the purpose of sharing on social media. You’ll be stripping away at the motivation for websites everywhere (including this one) to make dumb hollow mindgarbage. At the same time, you’ll increase the incentive for these websites to be (if nothing else) more consistent and less desperate for your attention.