A year of reading RSS again
Last autumn I unsubscribed from most things and set up a feed reader, the way I used to read the web fifteen years ago. I expected to drift back within a month. It has been a year.
The difference is that a reader has an end. When the unread count is zero I am done, and I close it. Nothing rearranges itself to keep me there.
What I follow now
- About thirty personal sites, most of which post monthly at best.
- Release notes for the handful of tools I depend on.
- Two newspapers, sections only.
- A few photographers whose work I would otherwise never see.
What I got wrong at first
I subscribed to everything that offered a feed, and within a week the count was in the hundreds. The fix was a rule: if I mark a source as read without opening anything three times in a row, it goes.
Plenty of sites still publish a feed and simply do not advertise it. Trying /feed or /rss.xml on the end of an address works more often than you would think.