One Month In: RSS and A Slow Web Rebound

Sundays are for RSS 🦝

— Dave Rupert (@davatron5000) February 28, 2021

After setting up my RSS feed last month, I set out to reconnect with my web design community roots. I want to extinguish or lessen the idle/doom-scrolling of Twitter and Reddit and tame the always-another email newsletter.

Setup and Awareness

Dave suggested feedbin, which looked like the right balance of power and simplicity to me. To be honest, I didn’t do a lot of comparison shopping, nor was on the cusp of modern feed reader featuresets, so it was all a delight to me after a long spell away. The unique email address feedbin generates that I can use to subscribe to newsletters was a nice surprise to me - though a couple resources didn’t offer a means for me to supply an email separate from my login/billing info, like codepen.

Please make your RSS easier to find!

It’s hard to find everyone’s RSS feeds. I got into a pattern of looking for domain/feed|rss|atom before giving up. Most blogging platforms or static site generators have plugins or templates that create RSS feeds automatically. I want to cmd + f on your site and find RSS. At least once I even scoured the GitHub repo for clues. It is sad to give up searching for a stellar person I follow on Twitter or find elsewhere, knowing that their future content will be relegated to the unforgiving stream only.

I only have three tags so far: humans, news, and tech. I think newsletters may come into the mix at some point too.

Signal vs. Noise

The feeds I follow have helped me find other folks. I am discovering an ever-growing web of humans. As it should be. These updates always take precedent over anything from a larger outlet. I cannot possibly read all the news. And there is often overlap amongst providers. The important stuff still gets to me. I have not felt guilty once marking all news or tech as read. At one point there were over 800 news articles, from about 7 or so days of not looking at it. All wiped away with a click.

I’ve saved my RSS feed export on github. It’s already been handy in sharing with a colleague that wanted some development resources.