RSS in an Integral Part of the IndieWeb Experience
In 2023, I was recovering from an illness and bedridden. I picked up my old iPad and opened my feed reader, which I hadn't done in years. Many of the blogs I'd initially followed circa 2014 were dead, but there were still a few actively posting. Out of boredom, I began to clean out the dead feeds and look for newer and better ones to replace them. That experience led to this blog post. I found so many interesting independent blogs that I decided that even someone like me could get in on the action.
In case you are wondering, RSS is a method of content delivery where information created by bloggers and publishers is delivered to a special program or website that you set up. You can subscribe to RSS feeds, usually for free, and whenever that blog or website is updated, the new information shows up in your feed reader.
Many people I now consider to be my good Internet friends are people I first discovered by seeing them on someone else's blogroll. I spend part of every day looking at my feed reader. Aside from the basic RSS mechanism I describe above, there are ways to use the protocol to do all kinds of things. The best site I have found to not only educate you on RSS but to provide you with access to a huge variety of tools and services is GitHub - AboutRSS/ALL-about-RSS: A list of RSS related stuff: tools, services, communities and tutorials, etc.
I encourage everyone from newbies to co-inventors of the protocol to have a good look around. Click on a few links. Try out some new tools for discovering interesting content.
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