Lately, I’ve noticed a renewed interest in RSS. The reasons for that
are not hard to understand. As yesterday’s post made clear, social
media has become a toxic wasteland interested only in collecting the
intimate details of our lives and selling them to their real
customers, the advertisers.
The driving force behind the movement back to RSS is the belief that
“news” obtained from social media is over processed white bread
rendered mostly useless by questionable algorithms and adulterated
with advertiser sponsored “content.”
Wired has an article on the return to RSS that considers the major
practical question about that return: what should I use as my RSS
reader? It used to be that for most people the easiest answer was
Google Reader. Then, of course, Google killed the product leading many
to predict the death of RSS and, as a consequence, blogs. Happily
neither of those predictions came true but that still leaves the
problem of what to replace Google Reader with.
If you’re an Emacs user, I can’t recommend Christopher Wellons’ Elfeed
enough. It’s very flexible and runs right in Emacs. Mike Zamansky has
an excellent three-video series on it (1, 2, 3) if you want to see it
in action and how you can customize it.
Before Elfeed, I used Feedly and really liked it. It runs in your
browser so you don’t need to worry about a separate application. I’d
still be using it except I wanted to move my RSS reading into Emacs.
If you’re not an Emacs user or don’t want to use it for reading RSS,
Feedly is an excellent choice.
The Wired article talks about other readers as well. It’s an
interesting article and provides insight into the reinvigorated
interest in RSS. Definitely worth a read.