I mentioned in my mini instapaper review that I follow a lot of different websites. The number of these sites has grown over the last few months, making it a fairly time consuming task to keep up to date with them. Recently I have started to use RSS as a means of checking for new articles on each of these sites.
Now I am aware that RSS is fairly ancient in terms of technologies, but it was never something that I had much use for up until now. Back in 2013, Google decided to shut down Google Reader which was one of the most prominent RSS services on the web. At the time I remember reading about this and thinking what was the big deal. Why don’t people just browse the websites individually instead? But I was missing the point entirely. The main purpose of RSS is to offer convenience and time saving.
I discovered RSS after stumbled across a service called “Feedly”. This is a simple RSS reader which allows the user to store and organise any number of RSS feeds to their account. The excellent app crawls each of the feeds and displays any new articles that have yet to be seen.
What this means is I can flick through new articles for websites in a fraction of the time that it would take me to browse through each of those websites individually. I don’t find myself missing anything new from these sites now, and if there are too many articles to read they can go straight into Instapaper (Instapaper integration is built right in).
Feedly also offer their service through apps for Windows, OS X and, Android and through any browser. That kind of cross platform availability is rare these days. Just reading through their apps page shows just how many devices and users they can reach. There are countless other RSS services available to suit anyones tastes. Lets hope RSS is here to stay for a while to come.