In Chris Dixon's book, "Read Write Own" (check out Molly White's review first before buying), he talks about the fall of RSS and how it failed to compete with the social networks. Like Molly, I use RSS daily to subscribe to blogs and news outlets.
Instead of an algorithm dictating what I spend my attention on, I have a handcrafted list of sources which I view in chronological order. This is where I find a lot of my inspiration for my writing as well as staying up to date with the latest tech trends.
RSS is far from dead, but it is being purposefully ignored by corporations as it doesn't fit the narrative of exploiting its users and extracting as much money as possible from them. A chronological RSS feed isn't going to use your previous viewing habits to feed an algorithm, to show you content, to keep you on the platform longer, so that you can watch more adverts.
I realise though that I am possibly in the minority when it comes to RSS users.
When I first started using the internet, RSS was the way that you stayed up to date with content. There was no Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or TikTok. To find interesting content on the internet you needed to "surf the web", going from website to website and using blogrolls to find interesting sites.
At the time I had all of my RSS feeds in Google Reader. Naturally, Google killed off this product in 2013 as they would rather people use search to find content and view adverts in the process.
For a time I switched to Feedly, but I wasn't keen on the magazine style layout. I prefer a long list of content that I can scroll through and pick out the articles that seem interesting. I now self-host FreshRSS and use Lire on my phone.
As a technology, RSS works really well. It is decentralised and nearly every website supports it (even YouTube).
The problem is, that a lot of websites don't advertise the fact that they have an RSS feed. For those that do it only really helps those that know what RSS is already.
For the curious, clicking on an RSS feed will present them with a page of XML code, or it will start downloading an RSS file. This is not user-friendly at all.
It turns out there is a good solution to this. RSS feeds come in a few formats. I am not going to go into the details of the differences between ATOM and RSS, but in short, they are both XML files.
The good things about XML, is that it can be styled using an XSLT stylesheet. Which will turn a horrible page like this (my raw YouTube Atom feed) into something readable like this (my blog Atom feed)
If you want to do this on your own website, I suggest giving Darek Kay's article on "Style your RSS feed" a read.
It is mostly just a case of adding the XSLT to your website, referencing it in your feed code, and referencing your own CSS file in the XSLT.
I think if more people made their RSS feeds user-friendly it would have a much wider adoption and make us all a bit less reliant on social media platforms to stay up to date.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
📝 Article - The Forged Apple Employee Badge - I am not such a big Apple lover that I would ever consider buying an old employee badge, however there are people who will, as well people who will try and scam you. I do however like guitars and often see people on Reddit asking if a guitar listing is fake or not. Whether you are into guitars, Pokémon cards, antique jewellery or old employee badges, make sure you know how to spot a fake.
🎓 Course - 100 Exercises To Learn Rust - Rust has been on my learning to-do list for a while. As with most skills, the best way to learn is by doing. This looks like a great way to start learning Rust.
📝 Article - Search is dead — long live curation - Search results are already coming back with useless AI written content that in most cases is factually incorrect but sounds plausible. Google are planning on doing away with search results and skipping straight to showing you AI drivel instead. Now seems the perfect time to start curating that RSS feed collection.
📝 Article - My Blogging Workflow - I have started using Eleventy for my new website and I plan to add a lot more content on a range of topics this year. Robb posts all sorts of things to his website, and it is interesting to see how he does it.
📝 Article - Found at last: long-lost branch of the Nile that ran by the pyramids - I used to find the Egyptians fascinating as a kid, and wondered how they managed to build the pyramids. Obviously not tech related but quite interesting none the less.
🎓 Course - D3 in Depth - D3 is a great way to produce visualisations on the web. This site has some great examples and tutorials to get you started.
📝 Article - Things I Find Github Copilot Actually Useful For - With all the negativity around AI it is interesting to see how people are using it and actually finding it useful.
💬 Quote of the Week #
There is no predicting what new bit of knowledge will open a new door and expand your universe, so I simply chase my interests and consume new content, wherever my curiosity takes me.
From the book Someday is Today by Matthew Dicks.
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