¶ RSS is Cool and You Should Be Using It
/Every time I come across a Twitter thread that is 20 tweets long my heart sinks and wishes the author would have just written a coherent blog post instead. Despite what the social media networks want you to think, blogs are still cool.
Blogs are cool because they typically contain whole thoughts, instead of fragmented quips. Blogs also possess a flair of their author’s style in the design. You can tell a lot about an author by the design of their blog. What colors do they like? Do they like subtle or audacious blockquote styles? Do they prefer their text to span the entire width of the browser, or do they believe in breathy, airy margins?
That all said, I can understand the desire to get everything in one place. It can be arduous to check many blogs every day to see if there is something new to read. It’s so much easier to let the stories come to you.
This is why you need RSS, which is as cool as blogs are. RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. Wikipedia describes RSS as such:
RSS is a type of web feed which allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. These feeds can, for example, allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator. The news aggregator will automatically check the RSS feed for new content, allowing the content to be automatically passed from website to website or from website to user. This passing of content is called web syndication. Websites usually use RSS feeds to publish frequently updated information, such as blog entries, news headlines, or episodes of audio and video series.
Did you know that if you listen to podcasts you’re already using RSS and that your podcast app is a news aggregator? The entirety of podcasting is built on RSS feeds, and diligently deliver fresh content to you whenever a new episode is available.
This can be done for blogs, too. Almost every blog out there has an RSS feed. The feed for this site is http://fullcitypress.com/articles?format=rss. You can subscribe by adding that address to your RSS reader of choice. And there are so many to choose from!
A brief list of RSS services that are either free or little cost:
These services act as the backbone of your RSS experience. All of them have their own websites you can use to see your feeds, and many offer their own apps. But the really neat thing is the open nature of RSS allows these services to be used with other reader apps so you can have the experience you prefer regardless of which service is acting as the backbone.
For instance, I use Feed Wrangler as my aggregator service, but I experience my RSS reading on Mac and iOS through an app called Reeder. But if someday I found myself not liking Reeder anymore or if it were to fade from existence, I could go to another app, like NetNewsWire, and plug it into Feed Wrangler. Or if Feed Wrangler were to announce it was going away, I could export my feeds as a standard file, and take them with me to another service.
RSS is truly beautiful in its openness, ubiquity, and simplicity. And there are so many great things to read out there on the open web, with no algorithm deciding whether or not you see what is important to you. You just subscribe, sit back, and the content comes to you. Then you can decide whether to read it or not.
So why don’t you check out one of those RSS services I listed above? I hear Feedbin and Feedly are really good places to start, but I haven’t tried either myself.
And if you want to flex those RSS muscles with podcasts, I highly recommend you listen to Mac Power Users #509, where Brent Simmons — the creator of NetNewsWire — is the guest. It’s a fantastic episode with a lot of talk about the value of RSS and blogging.
Finally, don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed.