RSS: a public service announcement
I wanted to explain what RSS was to those of you who don't already know. Because it's really great and you should be using it.
Like the postal service, for websites
Without RSS, you have a bunch of websites that you like visiting. (Why, thank you.) They put out regular content and you don't want to miss anything. So you remember them all and you go there regularly, or you leave tabs open and refresh them, or some other barbaric nonsense.
Here the onus is on you to fetch that content. You have to reach out to each individual place and grab what's new. You're going to miss things, or just forget things, and it's a lot of work.
Your mail gets delivered
This isn't how your postal mail works. Imagine if you had to go to each of your contacts and say, excuse me, do you have any new mail for me?
Eventually you'd forget to ask Aunty Doreen for her mail because it's always about Gerald and isn't he perfect and then she'd get upset and cut you out of the will.
RSS is like your postman
The mail service serves as an aggregator of your mail. They collect it all, bring it to one central place -- your mailbox -- and you can go there at your leisure and read about Gerald's latest test scores damn the little weasel he never fails.
Get some (free) software
We're going to use NetNewsWire because it's been around since the dawn of time, is free, and open source. (NewsBlur is a website that does the same job. And there are many others -- just search.)
Download it and go to File → New Feed… Copy/paste the URL of this blog post in there. Click Add. Done.
You'll see all of my old posts load. (You can select them all and 'mark as read'.) And when I publish new stuff, it'll just arrive. You don't need to do anything.
Add some more sites
The vast majority of blog-like sites have an 'RSS feed'. That's what NetNewsWire needs. But you don't need to care about that. I can't remember the last time that I had to do anything other than add any URL from the site. The feed should be discovered automatically.
That's it?
Basically. Stop going to sites. Let them come to you.