Obsessed With RSS

Remember blogrolls from back in the early 2000s? Those little columns in your sidebar listing all the blogs you followed, from your Internet friends in Baltimore, Boston, and Oakland to the Norwegian dude with unparalleled knowledge of caffeinated beverages. Blogrolls were a window into your soul, showcasing your interests, political leanings, and your allies and haters. But blogrolls died an ignoble death, replaced by Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter.

Now, Facebook is a place for old people to complain about schools forcing kids to piss in litter boxes, and Twitter is overrun with spam—AI spam, crypto spam, self-publishing spam, and horny posting spam links to the spicy 🌶 site. Gone are the days of the guy eating beans while watching Cars 2 or the monkey in a jacket at a department store, or the runaway llamas. Social media will never experience moments like that again.

So how do we get our information now? Are we supposed to read newspapers? Watch local television? Talk to people and learn about the world by engaging with it? Nuts to that! We want information shot into our faces, like a drink from Mr. Firehose on the Stanley Spadowski show. Enter RSS. The blogroll's back, baby, and it's back in a big way.

I need to get drenched by the news hose, so I've spent most of the day fiddling with RSS servers, flip-flopping between FreshRSS and Miniflux. FreshRSS is more full-featured, but Miniflux's simplicity and ease of quickly sharing to Pocket on Android has won me over. For now, anyways. Here's my current RSS workflow that gets me my article fix:

  1. Subscribe to RSS Feeds: I subscribe to feeds in Miniflux— news sources like the New York Times and NPR, sports blogs, culture magazines, etc. Anything that seems interesting and that has an RSS feed gets added. Most of them I never actually read anything from, but I stay subscribed until the feed breaks or stops getting updated.

  2. Notifications Off: I keep notifications turned off. I will decide when I get drenched by the news hose.

  3. Scroll and Save: I scroll through headlines on my phone, usually while I'm scarfing a bagel for breakfast. If I see a headline or blurb that interests me, I save it to my Pocket account.

  4. Read on E-reader: Pocket sends it to my e-reader, ready for me to read at my leisure. (Although I usually don't actually get off my phone to read on my e-reader, the potential is there for me to be able to read without the distraction.)

Today was one of the days when I actually spent some time reading instead of scrolling. And thanks to my RSS feeds, I've read about the effectiveness of read-alouds for older children, Willie Mays, Rat Boys, and even a poem about Trans Pikachu. I also saved an article on how to handle my sexy nemesis—a deeply concerning issue that I need to read about before it's too late.

Whether I'm at the dentist's office, waiting in the Chipoltlane, or sitting alone in the woods, I can read RSS feeds, or at least skim headlines and save to read later. I am never without my precious articles. The news hose is constantly spraying. The world is at my fingertips, largely free of ads and spam and paywalls. This is the future, and it is also the past. It's the way forward and the way back.