Cory Doctorow has a wonderful write up about RSS (You should be using an RSS reader).
I’ve long used RSS to follow the news (and other things). I tried to look up when I started using RSS, but couldn’t find a hard date. Given my remembrances (and a quick search on Middle School Matters), I would posit that it was around 2008. At first, like so many things, I didn’t get it. However, I quickly learned that instead of checking a variety of websites, I could get an RSS feed to see only the things that changed. This saved me tons of time.
With the advent of Facebook and other social media, many people have relied on social media to provide news. That means being at the whim and decisions of Mark Zuckerberg or another billionaire.
In the meantime, I have continued with my RSS feed. I have many different categories that I follow, a couple are educational, a few are humor, a few are sports related, a couple are Apple related, and comics.
One of the main points for me is that I like to read the comics. As a kid, I loved the comics page. As an adult, well, I still loved the comics page. As newspapers started going away, I wanted to continue with the comics. RSS allows me to do that.
GoComics provides an RSS feed for their comics. Originally, I created a single comics feed. That was a bad idea as if I wanted to add or delete one, I had to recreate the whole feed. Plus, if something broke (remember that was the early days). Later, I learned to create a feed for each comic. Now I can add or remove a comic quite easily. I currently have 90 comics that “come to me”.
Personally, I use NetNewsWire as my RSS reader of choice (with Feedly to keep everything in sync). Read Cory Doctorow’s write up though, he has some additional suggestions and thoughts. (NetNewsWire has a long history. It is available for iOS, Mac, and iPad. It is open source, free, and wonderful).
RSS is even more useful now than ever. Mastodon and BlueSky both are RSS feeds. (Podcasts are RSS feeds unless they are locked up on a big company site – like Spotify or Amazon). Cory Doctorow makes a great point that many sites do have RSS feeds (though some sites are locked down behind paywalls).
Go read You should be using an RSS reader by Cory Doctorow. If you are interested in comics and would like my feeds, let me know. RSS is easy to share.
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