What if I were to tell you that there is a way to automatically be notified whenever your favorite blogs publish a new post. Wouldn’t you be ecstatic? Luckily, there is. It’s a type of technology that is built into every website, and it’s called RSS. It’s a little more complicated to set up than Facebook, but it’s worth it in the long run to have a curated reading list with you, wherever you go.
To do so, it’s pretty easy. All you need is to decide if you want an app that syncs,1 and then pick an app accordingly and you’re off to the races!
There are plenty of RSS readers and syncing services out there, so here are the three of the most common.
These three apps are have their own sync service, which is key for me. While researching this article, I found this post by Zapier very helpful as well.
Once you have the app downloaded and an account set up, you can begin adding websites. I recommend adding websites that don’t post too frequently, because it’s easy to burnout on RSS. When I first started using RSS, I added several websites that published 10’s of articles a day. Since then, I’ve trimmed my feed down so that my unread articles rarely peak 25. For a deeper dive into the topic, Marco Arment wrote a great post on how to use RSS awhile ago and it still holds true.
I’m always wary when people say that RSS is dead, or does not have a place in today’s society. RSS is a standard that will be around forever, and the community is thriving. To serve an unfulfilled niche is something to be proud of; I hope to spread awareness of this product and keep this community thriving.
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This would be useful if you have the same application on an iPhone and iPad and want to have the status of both be the same at all times. For example, if the article is read on the iPhone, it’ll disappear on the iPad. This should also mean that you can read articles on the web, as well. ↩︎