Taking back control of your time with RSS and emails

It’s sad that RSS (or Atom) as a way of consuming web content (not considering podcasts) has become a “power user niche”. In a centralized world where most people get most of their (fake) news from Facebook or WhatsApp, RSS/Atom doesn’t stand much of a chance for gaining broader mainstream use.

The biggest advantage of using an RSS reader is that it’s a single place that has content ready for you to consume in a list based interface. The web browser interfaces of websites, on the other hand, have all kinds of crazy and trendy layouts where content is a third class citizen (first class and second class are both reserved for ads). This makes skimming easier and quicker. There’s only one way to skim in an RSS reader regardless of which site’s feed you’re looking at. You don’t have to go through the mental exhaustion of skimming several different website layouts, fonts, colors, etc.

I use a couple of RSS apps across devices, and at least one of them is running all the time to refresh content periodically so that I don’t miss something (I know there are online aggregators, but I haven’t found something that I liked and preferably very cheap too). I don’t try to read all the articles across sources since that’d be an endless effort, not to mention completely wasteful. I skim through, read some, star some for future reference or use and mark the specific source (or all) as read.

One thing I hate about many sites that provide RSS feeds is the lack of full text content in the feed. It’s always a jarring experience to open the link to the full content and experience chaos that’s in complete contrast to the reader experience.

On Mac and iOS, I’d recommend NetNewsWire (free and open source). In the past, I’ve used RSSOwl (cross platform) and Vienna.

Nice to see my own toy-project `rss2email` listed there!

I wrote that as a trivial golang application, specifically because that the original python-based rss2email project was the only reason I ever had any python on my main server.

I use RSS/ATOM every day via the feature that introduced me to the concept - Firefox Live Bookmarks (via Waterfox).

I've hung on as long as I can, but between Waterfox Classic being on an older ESR and it getting sold to Privacy One, I'm ready to bite the bullet and move on to a non-browser rss feed reader.

what rss reader gets as close to live bookmarks as possible? There is the livemarks extension for FF but it doesn't actually update / tell you if a given link has been visited.