I’ve written numerous posts—the latest one here—about my admiration for RSS and how I use it to deliver interesting posts directly to my Emacs. I’m an unabashed fan and have never understood those who claim it died when Google Reader was discontinued. I don’t feel the need to have my technology choices validated by Google and neither, apparently, do scores of over people who continue to use and benefit from RSS.
Jake Zimmerman has a contrary take. He wasn’t around when Google Reader was extant and everyone agreed that RSS was the way to curate your blog reading. He’s a newcomer who has only been using it for a week and he has some gripes.
He has two main problems. The first is that it can be difficult to find a link to a feed or even determine if there is one. Many sites have a link embedded in the HTML but browsers don’t reveal it so unless the site has an RSS button or link, the user is reduced to making a guess at the feed name and trying to add it to their RSS client. I can’t remember ever having this problem. Every site I visit either has an RSS link or it’s easily discoverable with a DuckDuckGo search.
His second problem is with RSS clients. He can’t find one that works the way that he likes. His requirements are pretty specific: he wants to do everything in the browser and he wants to be able to read his feeds on his phone. I, of course, don’t have either of those problems. I read my feeds in Emacs with Elfeed, which is very configurable and being written in Elisp is easy customize. That means, of course, that I can’t read my feeds on my iPhone or iPad but I’ve never felt the need to do that.
Finally Zimmerman complains that he’s finding it hard to discover a good set of feeds. He either gets feeds that give him too much or not enough. I suspect that this is an operational matter. I generally get about 90 links a day but I don’t read them all. Many are obviously about something I’m not interested in so I just skip them. For the rest, I either read the post in Elfeed if it’s given or press a single key to pop the post up in my browser if not.
I take Zimmerman’s point that RSS can be a little fussy to use but not nearly so much as the alternative of checking each blog periodically to discover if there’s anything new worth reading. Still, Zimmerman has some points and his post is worth reading.