Recently, I stumbled across a couple of posts about the virtues and superiority of RSS. I was a little surprised because it seems like a no-brainer to me. What’s the competition? Facebook and G+? Those are systems for harvesting your private information and in any event filter what you see in a way that might not match your preferences.
What about Twitter? No one knows what Twitter’s for but it appears to be mainly a platform for people with a loose grasp on reality to express—and express and express—their political opinions.
The sweet spot for RSS, I think, is following a blog that posts every few days or perhaps even more irregularly. That strategy saves me a lot of time: rather than check a blog for a post that might not be there, I just let the post come to me. For blogs that publish once or more everyday, I simply check the blog once a day. There’s no reason to clog up my feed with a bunch of posts that I know will be there.
The other big question for RSS is what reader to use. For me, that’s also a no-brainer. Even if I didn’t prefer to do as much as possible in Emacs, I’d still use elfeed. I like its search features and the fact that I can search for old posts. Even so, me use of elfeed is pretty elementary. Take a look at Mike Zamansky’s three posts on using elfeed [1, 2, 3] to get an idea of what can be done with it.