You want to follow different topics without having an account on 5 different social networks ? You don’t want to trap yourself in Twitter, Facebook or others ? I got the solution for you !
RSS feeds
It may seem stupid but what if you could simply just subscribe directly to any blog or online newspaper that you like and find about every new post on single application ? Too good to be true ? Not for me as it has been the dream I have been living for quite some time now. Others have been doing the same since forever because the first version of RSS came out in 1999.
How does it work ?
You simply use the RSS feed link that the website provide you and input it in one of the numerous rss client that people have been creating and sharing for free forever. Personally, I have been using NetNewsWire on MacOs and iOS for quite some time and I really like it.
Once the install is complete you can find the link of the website you want to subscribe to. If the website is configured properly, the web page you are on should have a hidden link that your RSS client will use to subscribe. Thanks to this hidden link, you can use the url of the website and directly pass it down to your RSS app. The application will then find it and use it without any input from your side.
For example if you want to subscribe to NASA image of the day, you can simply copy the website link and put it in you RSS reader. If you inspect the page and search for “alternate” you should find the following line :
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="NASA » Feed" href="https://www.nasa.gov/feed/" />
This is the link your client will read and use to subscribe. If the website you want to follow doesn’t have one hidden there your RSS client will struggle to find the URL it should use for RSS. Hence you will have to look around next to the “social media” links. By hovering on all the links you should be able to find the one corresponding to RSS. Rest assured, you only have to do this in very specific cases where the website owner hasn’t followed good practice.
After this the application will refresh your feed every now and then by trying to connect to the website you are subscribed to, on the feed you chose. For the NASA picture of the day example, NASA will upload a new article with an image every day and when you RSS client comes to see if there is any update it will find the new post. It will in turn display it to you.
How to use : simple edition
- Install a RSS client on your phone or on your PC
- Copy the link of the website you want to subscribe to into the RSS client
- Check only your RSS client feed once a day and stay informed via it
What is it useful for ?
Job hunting
Many job platforms will provide a way to subscribe to different RSS feeds. You will have feed for different areas, different profile types and you may even be able to create a personnalized feed for your account. Very useful and so much better than getting random notifications on LinkedIn and others. It can also allow you to stay on the look out for opportunites even if you are not “open to work” on Linkedin or straight up refuse to use this website.
Staying informed
Many online newspapers will allow you to subscribe with RSS and almost every small blogger will let you see every post from them this way. It allows for a great medium to stay informed and gain knowledge. It is always important to stay on top of your game, especially for programmers. With the way RSS work and its omnipresence, you can find feeds for everything.
Staying free
With RSS you and the writer don’t depend on a big tech to continue reading/writing. Google, Twitter and others could disappear tomorrow and you would still be able to read my RSS feed without any issues. It is very important to not stay locked in their ecosystem because they could simply fail at some point or decide they don’t want to have anything to do with you. Another example, the future of X/Twitter is uncertain. Nobody can say for sure it will still be here in 5 to 10 years. In addition, it also allows for more freedom of speech. You could get banned for posts that are not hateful speech but that the social network owner don’t approve of.
Having reliable sources
The people serving RSS feeds have way more chances to be at least a little bit interesting if you compare them to say : a random blog post on reddit or a tweet. When you are writing a post for a blog or writing a news article, you may spend more than two minutes choosing your words and writing your text. You may also having something to say and not just some cheap and easy comment on the hot topic of the day.
Reducing noise
With RSS there is no noise. Only post from websites that you subscribed to can reach you. No bullshit “for you” algorithm, no “hot takes” in a single sentence on Twitter. If you don’t click the article link and stay in you RSS client there is also no comments. It becomes easy to dodge the non constructive comments if you don’t want to read comments to begin with.
It truly is a bliss and it’s a shame more people are not using this technology.