My RSS way

RSS still exists. It’s still the most brilliant, discrete and beautiful technology to get served content. Here’s how to use it at its best.

RSS is for “interesting stuff that you follow”. You don’t need them every day per se. But you don’t want to click on all of those sources every single time you think about browsing their new stuff. You want to be able to do that from one application that allows you to browse quite some content, at once.

Yes, an RSS reader is crucial because it separates the web, email and interesting things.

• Web: anything, but mostly quick things.
• Email: mostly work and friends, maybe some deals and notifications about important shit.
• RSS: interesting things.

I say interesting things instead of news because I believe this is the only way to use RSS: to gather things that make you think mostly positively. Which is the exact opposite of news. News, torrents of vapid ass shit that is so addicting, are everywhere from your coworkers, the radio and family members on social media. You really don’t want to subscribe to that kind of content. It’s just not interesting.

Now, to build an index of interesting things takes a long time. Years. At first I only had a dozen feeds, mostly friends’ blogs. Then I extended to a few folders: design|gamedev|people|music|tech in each of these categories I added feeds, one at a time. RSS being discrete –it barely takes any space- I’ve never deleted more than a few feeds in 14 years. And RSS being so strong, it’s delightful to have a dormant feed for years and all of sudden, you read a new post that says ”I’m back” or something like that. It’s awesome because it comes to you. RSS is the best mailman on earth.

Make sure your RSS reader has an import/export OPML feature. OPML is basically the .zip of your feeds. What it does is, if you don’t like your RSS reader, you can use another one, pop in your OPML file and you’re back in business in 2 seconds. It’s wonderful (and why most recent RSS readers don’t support it: they want you to stay forevah). Of course, save one in your cloud and whatever happens to your machine, you can go back to reading wonderful things in a heartbeat. Dope.

Don’t share that OPML file. I mean, of course you can. But what I mean is that it should be considered like your “secret source”. Share the links, articles, paragraphs. Don’t share the whole thing. The whole thing is yours and yours only. Subtle obscurity is fine.

Disable any type of notification and make sure that once you visit a feed, it checks all posts as read. RSS is about Z reading through a lot of great things or stopping on a tremendous 1,200 words post. It’s not about reading as much as possible or check some arbitrary number (I read 300 feeds a day, resPEK me!). In the same way, don’t synchronize between your phone, laptop and or tablet. Just have RSS on ONE machine and ONE machine only. Trust me, I tried the sync thing and it’s terrible because it doesn’t work so well outside the big RSS players and it’s a terrible experience where you “run” after making everything disappear. We all have that already with email, let’s not do that with RSS. Not on my watch.

Yes, you can do most of that with newsletters, social media and favorites in your browser. But you lose the flow. You start doing too many different things in the same software. Not only it feels weird –work in a tab, fascinating article in another one, stupid TMZ next, etc– but it kills performance, your laptop gets hot bingo, your knee caps just got seared.

Meanwhile, I’m been using the same RSS reader since 2004. Around 150 feeds. In one month, thousands of articles. In six months, hundreds of thousands. The software doesn’t even flinch. I can skim through months-old content like I’m browsing local files. It’s been like this since my old ass and beloved Centrino laptop. I clean up the database once a year and it’s not even because my machine slows down, it’s because the app keeps telling me I might want to. RSS is insanely efficient compared to a web page that tracks you, that feeds you ads, that shows you a pop-up etc. You don’t need to fight, click “no” or “please, no wtf” while waiting on the browser to display everything. RSS is super-fast.

Don’t listen to the doom and gloom. 14 years that I’ve been using RSS. Every single WordPress website has a feed. So does Tumblr. So does Craigslist. So does many, many things. Services exist to RSS other feeds like social media. I won’t tell where because walled gardens are so powerful, we’re in the “don’t ask don’t tell” era of RSS. If it works, don’t touch it.

I suggest you use your reader with feeds on one side, content on the other side. 2 pane view. You don’t want 3 pane view because it slows you down and becomes more like email and you don’t want that. You want to have access to interesting things as fast as you can. 2 pane view does that very well. “hey, what’s up with this person?” You click on his/her feed boom, you have the content next to it. No “I read the title and then decide if I want to fully commit”. If you subscribe to interesting things, that’s not even an option: everything is worth your time! Hence why it’s important to subscribe to interesting things and not extremely light things like photos or YouTube playlists. Those are better to be used in social media apps or browsers.

Now go subscribe to that inspiration waiting for you.