A while ago, but still late to the party, I discovered RSS. And, upon discovery, I soon realised that here at last was what I had been searching for.

For those who don’t know or have forgotten all about it: RSS is a web feed or data format which can be used to keep track multiple different websites for updates in an RSS reader. RSS was released in 1999 and, according to Wikipedia, it gained widespread use between 2005 and 2006.

Keeping track of news websites, blogs, etc. used to be a big pain for me. At one point, I had a bookmark folder in my browser with all the sites I used to check regularly. Every so often, I opened all the sites under that folder in bulk and just went to each open tab one by one to see if there were any updates that looked interesting. The reason why I’m writing this post is because I often see people using the same or similar methods.

Because of RSS, you can download a reader and it will check all updates for you. You don’t need to open up a browser to check the websites itself, which, as you probably know, is often bloated with lots of advertisements anyways and has slow rendering as a result. (To be fair though, I also just don’t really like using the browser, or most GUIs in general.) You could also, for example, use it to follow channels on odysee or invidious (/youtube) by registering the RSS URL of the channel in your reader. So, instead of subscribing to the feeds on the platform itself, you can manage them all in the same app.

However, not all sites provide RSS, or at least not in obvious locations. For several of them, I had to inspect the HTML source code to find the URL. But, if your current method of following the news is rather cumbersome, or you just want to try out something new, give RSS a shot. For me, at least, it was quite a jaw-dropper.