“LONG LIVE RSS!”
I shout these words from my bedroom window every morning. Reaffirming my love for this century’s most criminally neglected data standard.
If you’ve either forgotten, or never enjoyed, the ease of managing your information consumption via the magic of RSS and a feed reader, then you’re missing out mate.
Struggling with the noise, gloom and general bombast of social media? Get yourself a feed reader and fill it full of interesting subscriptions for a most measured and sedate way to consume words.
Once upon a time everyone(*) used them. We engaged in educated discourse, shared blog rolls, sent trackbacks and wrote comments on each others websites. Elegant weapons for a more civilized age (**).
I like to read things when I have time to reduce distractions and give me change to absorb several viewpoints rather than simply the latest, hottest takes.
I’ve fine-tuned my approach to managing my reading and research. A few of the tools and services have changed, but the essentials stay the same. If you’re interested, here’s how I’ve made things work for me:
- Feedbin
- Manages all my subscriptions for blogs, newsletters and more into one easily accessible location
- Lots of sites still support RSS its not dead, merely resting
- Feedbin is great at discovering feeds if you just paste in a site URL. One of the magic parts of RSS
- You can also subscribe to newsletters with a special Feedbin email address and they’ll get delivered to your reader. Brilliant. You’re not making me go back into my inbox, its scary in there.
- Feedme. Feedbin allows me to read posts anywhere, but I use this Android app (there are others) as a client instead
- Regularly syncs with Feedbin, so I can have all the latest unread posts on my phone for the commute or an idle few minutes
- It provides a really quick interface to skim through posts and either immediately read the or add them to my “to read” list, in Pocket…
- Pocket. Mobile and web app that I basically use as a way to manage a backlog of things “to read”.
- Gives me a clutter free (no ads!) way to read content either in the browser (which I rarely do) or on my phone
- It has its issues with some content, but you can easily switch to a full web view
- Not everything I want to read comes in via my feed reader so I take links from Slack, Twitter or elsewhere and use the Pocket browser extension or its share button integration to stash things away for later reading. Basically if its not a 1-2 minute read it goes into Pocket until I’m ready for it. Keeps the number of browser tabs under control too.
- The offline content syncing makes it great for using on my commute, especially on the tube
- IFTTT. I use this service to do two things:
- Once I archive something in Pocket then it automatically adds them to Pinboard for me, using the right tags.
- If I favourite something it tweets out the link without me having to go and actually look at twitter
- Pinboard. Basically a complete archive of articles I’ve read.
- Gives me a backup separate to Pocket and public links to share tagged collections of articles with others. E.g. stuff I’ve cooked or am planning on cooking.
The end result is a fully self-curated feed of interesting stuff. I’m no longer fighting someone else’s algorithm, so I can easily find things again.
I can minimise number of organisations I’m following on twitter, and just subscribe to their blogs. Also helps to buck the trend towards more email newsletters which are just blogs but you’re all in denial.
Also helps to reduce the number of distractions, and fight the pressure to keep checking on twitter in case I’ve missed something interesting. It’ll be in the feed reader when I’m ready.
Long live RSS!
It’s about time we stopped rebooting social networks and rediscovered more flexible ways to create, share and read content online. Go read
Say it with me. Go on.
LONG LIVE RSS!
(*) not actually everyone, but all the cool kids anyway. Alright, just us nerds, but we loved it.
(**) not actually more civilised, but it was more decentralised
Lost Boy 