David Emery Online

Hi there, I’m David. This is my website. I work in music for Apple. You can find out a bit more about me here. On occasion I’ve been known to write a thing or two. Please drop me a line and say hello. Views mine not my employers.

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Sane RSS usage

5 September 2011

RSS is a great tool that’s very easy to misuse. And if you’re subscribing to any feeds that post more than about 10 items per day, you’re probably misusing it. I don’t mean that you’re using it in a way it wasn’t intended — rather, you’re using it in a way that’s not good for you.1

You should be able to go on a disconnected vacation for three days, come back, and be able to skim most of your RSS-item titles reasonably without just giving up and marking all as read. You shouldn’t come back to hundreds or thousands of unread articles.

I disagree with a lot of the points both Marco and Jacqui are making here – mostly that it’s possible to use RSS “wrong”. It’s akin to saying that everyone should stop using SMS as that can be distracting – it’s using your phone “wrong”.

I am a heavy RSS user, but I find it immensely useful. According to Google Reader I’m currently subscribed to 990 feeds and have read over 50,000 items in the last 30 days, but I find this in no way stressful or counter productive. I follow some feeds that average over 100 posts per day, and some that don’t even post once every month. You can use RSS this way, and in fact I’d argue that it’s the best source of news you could ever come up with.

Now, that’s not to say there aren’t some good pieces of advice in their two articles. Firstly, I don’t check my feeds all day – that would be impossible. RSS is not twitter, and it’s not really best I don’t think for real time news (although you could use it for that if you wanted). What it’s best for is assembling a custom built newspaper of all your interests, or at least that’s how I treat it. Roughly 3 times a day – in the morning, at lunch and in the evening – I check my feeds, and skim through them exactly as I would a newspaper. The articles allude to a fear of marking all as read which is ridiculous – does any one really read a newspaper cover to cover, every word? RSS is the same, a source of interest to flick through and dip into, not to labour over like email.

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