The death of RSS has been greatly exaggerated. When Google Reader died, plenty of self-assured bloggers and podcasters pooh-poohed the technology in favor of getting their news fix on Twitter. The rise of services like Feedly, News Blur, and Feed Wrangler, however, all suggest that RSS is still alive and well..
I’ve always been an ardent believer in RSS, so I thought I’d share a few of my favorite uses for RSS.
Keep Up On Webcomics
Okay, so this isn’t a productive use for RSS, per se, but webcomics were the reason that I started using Google Reader in the first place. I had a huge list of webcomics that I followed, and got sick of trying to remember which days which comics updated. This is my second largest category in Feedly.
Skim News Headlines
If you’re new to RSS, you might feel overwhelmed by all the headlines in your feed reader and feel pressured to read everything. You don’t have to—I often use Feedly just to skim the daily tech headlines. I also use it to discover the apps and games that I review here at Macgasm every week. And let’s face it; you can only skim headlines on most larger sites and find out most of what you need to know. Mark the feed as read and move on.
Follow Industry-Specific Or Specialized Feeds
I work in the tech field, so I keep tabs on blogs for Office For Mac, VMWare ThinApp, Apple’s Swift programming language, and a couple of others that are so infrequently updated you’d have to be insane to check them every day. If you want to monitor sites specific to your job or hobbies, RSS is a great way to do it.
Those are just three ways RSS can help you get more done when you want to read the Web. Unread and Reeder are more my portal to the Web than Safari. And Feedly in the browser, combined with tags, can completely automate sharing (More on that later in the week.)
