Adam Sedwick

RSS Renaissance

It sure seems like RSS is having a moment right now, with all the talk around slow social, human curation, etc. I think Chris put it really well in his post, so I wont rehash a lot of what has already been said.

One this I did want to expand on was the experience he describes of RSS being either really lonely or incredibly overwhelming when you first get started. These were both my experience when I first started looking into following people with RSS feeds.

When you first decide to dive into an RSS reader you’re met with a big blank nothing. You need to add RSS feeds in order to have things show up and be able to read them. Many reader apps have a nifty “tell us about your interests and we’ll suggest or add some stuff” feature, but personally when I tried to use these in the past it either was not specific enough, or it suggested content farms which blow up your feed and make it unruly to manage.

Following something like The Verge is a sure fire way to get flooded with content that may or may not interest you. Even someone like John Gruber over at Daring Fireball can be a bit overwhelming with the amount of content he puts out (definitely still worth checking out though!).

I really like the suggestion of starting with the RSS feeds of people you already like and/or follow as well as a few aggregators/curators. When I restarted my RSS journey this past year I made the conscious decision to start small and grow the network of people I follow organically over time. This has produced a steady stream of “content” that I enjoy consuming, and allows me to feel like I am still connected to what is currently happening in the community through people who’s opinions I value and trust.

If you’re interested in getting started here’s a few I think are great:

Adam Sedwick

I work on Design systems and Advocate for Accessibility on the web.

Tennessee

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Design Systems

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Web Accessibility

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Open Web Standards