Atom/RSS Feeds are the Best Way to Consume the Web
I stay connected to websites I care about via an RSS/Atom feed reader. It’s better than social media for finding out what’s new because it’s clutter-free. By following RSS/Atom feeds, I discover wonderful gems that otherwise would be lost in the noise.
RSS is not dead #
Web syndication is alive and kicking. A vast majority of websites and online services expose RSS/Atom feeds, and you can find workarounds for those that don’t.
When I like individuals on the web, I tend to like pretty much everything that they write. Even when I connect to a fire hose, the RSS/Atom feeds are all content. Even when following pundits, you get long-form writing on websites instead of shallow opinions that must fit in 280 chars. Websites or even YouTube channels, compared with social media, are outlets in which people usually put more thought when expressing themselves.
My RSS/Atom feed reader is the best way to follow:
- Hacker News, via hnapp.com
- Twitter accounts that are important, via a self-hosted rss-bridge
- Library releases, via GitHub’s atom feeds
- Podcasts
- Reddit (a fire hose, but I can filter by subjects I care about)
- Programming communities (Scala, Haskell, etc)
- YouTube
News aggregators (RSS readers) #
Web hosted:
Native:
For your blog #
Own your audience!
If you’re cool enough to have your own blog, maybe you’ve built your website with a static website generator, such as Jekyll, but please don’t forget to expose an RSS/Atom feed. Those of us using a news aggregator will thank you ❤️ And if you expose an RSS feed, you can then build an automated newsletter from it too 😉
Here’s some cool stuff to get you going:
Enjoy 😎
