RSS

Reeder 4 Beta for Mac Is Here →

March 13, 2019 · 10:21

While I really like using Unread for more casual reading, nothing lets me get through my RSS queue quicker than Reeder for iOS and Mac. I love this app and I’m happy to see that a new version is coming. Silvio Rizzi mentions that the iOS version is almost ready and having spent the morning with the Mac version, it appears this will be a nice update. Since Reeder 3 debuted in 2015, Silvio hasn’t been charging for updates, so I’ll gladly pay for the new version. You can find a list of some of Reeder 4’s new features on his site.

July 26, 2018 · 08:17

Sometimes I wish I could follow people’s tweets via RSS (without jumping through any hoops).

It’s Time for an RSS Revival →

April 1, 2018 · 07:18

Brian Barrett, for Wired:

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) and it was first stitched into the tapestry of the open web around the turn of the millennium. Its aim is straightforward: to make it easy to track updates to the content of a given website in a standardized format.

In practice, and for your purposes, that means it can give you a comprehensive, regularly updated look at all of the content your favorite sites publish throughout the day. Think of it as the ultimate aggregator; every morsel from every source you care about, fed directly to you […]

I first started using RSS heavily back in 2008 or so and have been using it on a daily basis since then. That’s over a decade now (or close to it, depending if my memory serves me correctly).

RSS is one of the foundations of the web. It allows us an extremely simple way to follow posts on a website without actually remembering to check for new content. Or even visiting that site. It also allows us to read just the words of our favourite writers, on sites with many other wordsmiths, without having to wade through ever single post. RSS is a timesaver. It makes life easier. It works on extremely slow internet connections. It’s automatic.

RSS is wonderful.

The Case for RSS →

November 12, 2017 · 13:55

David Sparks:

If you are thinking about using RSS, I have a little advice. Be wary feed inflation. RSS is so easy to implement that it’s a slippery slope between having RSS feeds for just a few websites and instead of having RSS feeds for hundreds of websites. If you’re not careful, every time you open your RSS reader, there will be 1,000 unread articles waiting for you, which completely defeats the purpose of using RSS. The trick to using RSS is to be brutal with your subscriptions. I think the key is looking for websites with high signal and low noise. Sites that publish one or two articles a day (or even one to two articles a week) but make them good articles are much more valuable and RSS feed than sites that published 30 articles a day.

This is precisely why I have three categories of RSS feeds in Feedly: Must Read, Important, and Casual. Your mileage may vary, but this system works for me — I always have just the right amount of reading to catch up on and more available, should I need it and have the time to go through it.

JSON Feed Version 1 — Like RSS, With JSON Instead of XML →

May 17, 2017 · 21:06

Brent Simmons & Manton Reece:

The JSON Feed format is a pragmatic syndication format, like RSS and Atom, but with one big difference: it’s JSON instead of XML.

For most developers, JSON is far easier to read and write than XML. Developers may groan at picking up an XML parser, but decoding JSON is often just a single line of code.

Our hope is that, because of the lightness of JSON and simplicity of the JSON Feed format, developers will be more attracted to developing for the open web.

Create Your Own RSS Reader →

November 26, 2015 · 08:08

Dr. Drang:

My subscription to my current RSS service is running out in a month or so, and as I considered which provider I wanted to use for the next year, I began to wonder if I’d be satisfied with any of them. How hard would it be for me to make my own service that always serves updated versions of the most recent articles on the sites I subscribe to? After all, RSS is a distributed protocol. Just because we’ve all gotten used to accessing it through centralized services, that doesn’t mean we have to.

So I wrote a short script that goes through my subscriptions, plucks out the articles published (or updated) today, and creates a simple web page with all of them displayed in reverse chronological order.

You can view the code on Dr. Drang’s site if you’re interested in running something similar. I’m using Feedly — I got the lifetime Pro subscription — and I don’t plan on switching any time soon.