Like I’ve said in my latest Reducing Infinites post, I’ve switched back to using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as my primary means of consuming written content (rather that browsing social media feeds). So, how do we do this?
Read more: How to RSS?First: Pick a reader. I use NetNewsWire, which is free, lightweight, and open source. There are lots of them out there, though a great many of them seem to try to be competing with things like Apple News and/or Reddit by attempting to load in a lot of content all at once. NetNewsWire essentially loads the headline and a “read more” block (though I haven’t figured out how to make my own blogroll only deliver the stuff above the “Read More” block). This lets you rapidly scroll through your feed. Clicking the headline launches you out to someone’s page (giving them views like a good consumer).
Sites will usually have one (or more) RSS feeds. For this site, for example, you would use the following URL:https://briangrefenstette.com/feed/ in your RSS reader to load the blogroll. For web nerds, this is basically an XML page that has the excerpts from your last ~10 posts along with their links.
For popular blogs / websites they usually have a dedicated RSS page with a variety of sub-feeds. Here’s the one for Ars: https://arstechnica.com/rss-feeds/
…which takes one or two seconds of searching to find for the page that you actually want to load. After that, off to the races.
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