How I use my RSS reader

I was recently asked if I would participate in some user research looking at the future of RSS. I thought I’d share some of things I said in that interview here, in case interesting for others.

Initially I wasn’t sure if the interview was going to be about the future of RSS as a format, or more focused on how people are using RSS and feed readers. In the end it was about the latter, but it prompted me to reflect on how long I’ve been working with or using the technology.

For example, I helped with RSS 1.0, mostly with data validators back in 2000. And In 2004 I launched 20,000 RSS feeds for academic journals, at least some of which seem to still be working. Which is nice.

Anyway, I was a very enthusiastic interviewee 🙂

Some of the stuff I talked about is covered in an earlier post about how I manage my reading:

• Feedbin and its mobile app, as the RSS reader and aggregator
• Pocket for reading content offline, and it’s simple page view
• Pinboard for an bookmarking and as a form of personal reading archive

Feedbin and Pinboard are the most important tools to me and I pay for those. I could probably drop or change out Pocket with minimal hassle, but I like that it has some IFTTT integrations that allow me to automatically save to Pinboard or post to social media.

Here’s some of the other things I covered which aren’t in that post.

Just do one thing well

Firstly, the most important thing for me is that I just want to use tools that do one, or a few things, really well. I’m not looking for an all-in-one service that does everything. Because the impact of changing that service out if they go under or suddenly pivot their business model are too high.

Services like Flipboard, Pocket and others that try to incorporate not just following content, but also recommendations, social sharing, archiving, etc all seem to have revenue models built around ads.

I never want to see ads in my RSS reader. That’s the second most important thing to me.

Panning for gold

I use my RSS reader as a tool to quickly sift through all the feeds I follow to find the things I want to read. And then I go away and read them.

While I may read short or particularly interesting posts immediately, I usually just stash things in Pocket, then read them all after I’ve finished panning for gold. For me the activities of skimming through feeds is largely separate to reading.

I don’t try to read everything. Not everything in my feed will be relevant. But I know why everything is there, because I’ve subscribed to it.

That’s the third thing that’s most important to me: control over what I’m following.

Daily, Weekly, Occasional

To help me manage my feeds I group them under three tags:

• Daily — feeds whose content I’m interested in seeing on a daily basis. I skim these first
• Weekly — feeds whose content I don’t need to keep up with on a daily basis. E.g. long form content I might read once a week
• Occasional – stuff I dip into occasionally. I skim these last

If I’m really busy, or have a backlog of posts to review, I have no qualms about marking the Weekly or Occasional categories as read and just focusing on the rest.

I don’t want to feel pressured to try and read everything. This gives me a way to focus my attention.

Newsletters are just feeds

Your newsletter is a just a blog.

Feedbin gives you an email which surfaces any emails in your reader. So I just subscribe to newsletters this way. Frees me up from being tied to email because that’s what the author prefers.

Subscribing to different recommendation tools

This lead to a discussion about how I find new or interesting things. I do this by:

• Using services like Indieblog.page that introduce some randomness
• Following feeds from services like Hacker News Daily, that finds posts that are popular or are getting attention in specific communities.
• Following what friends are bookmarking on pinboard, because it generates RSS feeds for public bookmarks
• Following the #opendata tag on Medium

These essentially allow me to use different recommendation engines to follow different topics and communities. It helps me escape my immediate echo chamber, while still giving me some control over what I’m following.

There’s no single recommendation algorithm here, and I don’t think I want one.

Following organisations

I’ve largely stopped following organisational accounting on social media. They tend to repeatedly post the same things, e.g. links to their latest work, or boost others that are doing the same.

I follow people on social media and organisations in my feed reader. I’ll hoover up all your newsletters, blog posts, etc and will read it at my leisure.

It does frustrate me when organisations forget that they need to be on the web first, then social media second.

If you’ve got some tips or suggestions about your own use of RSS then I’d be interested to read them.