I have a confession: I’ve been getting really into RSS. I’ve been using NetNewsWire, and really like it. It’s so easy to add a new feed, and it syncs my read/unread status across devices. I also like the way that the app looks, it feels like just enough structure to be helpful.

Reverse chron

One of the best features of RSS is that it’s reverse chron. This is so inconsistently presented across websites in a browser, so being able to just look at what’s recently been published through RSS is so handy. It also keeps from getting overwhelmed by related content, or being distracted by something that happened years ago but is being featured high up on a site for some reason.

No design

For my easily overwhelmed brain, having articles presented in the same format acrosss websites has actually been really nice. I’m a little sad to lose the unique character of each site, but it allows me to just focus on what the author is saying and take that in.

One downside of this is cases where content has not been formatted in a way that RSS supports, so it ends up coming through as a blob of strange HTML. This happens a lot with image galleries and more interactive elements like that.

Publish date and time is complicated

One thing I noticed right away is that some sites do not set their publish date and time correctly. It’s either not in the right time zone, or it’s set in the past, or missing. The site that I noticed first was my own! I had been setting the time randomly. I don’t display publish time, just date, on the front end, but missed that this was messing up my RSS feed. I think some other sites are doing something similar, so it’s a good reminder to test the feed. I keep subscribed to my own site just to make sure that things are working correctly.

It’s okay to skip

Speaking of my overwhelmed brain, it took me a little while to stop reading literally every single thing that came through. This was a tipping point for me where I was able to subscribe to feeds that publish multiple times a day. Before, it was too much stuff, and it kept me from subscribing to some sites that I liked.

Why is this a confession

I’m a web developer! I make websites! RSS fits in a strange middle ground for me. I don’t want to rely on social media to follow these sites, but it’s hard to get a good overview of what’s been published recently without some sort of mechanism like that. Some websites offer an email newsletter, but this is so inconsistent across sites that it’s not a reliable system for keeping up to date. RSS also means that a site that doesn’t publish very frequently doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.