My post-RSS online lifestyle
It’s been a month or so since I unsubscribed from the majority of the RSS feeds I had in my bloglines account. I’ve kept the zope/plone related subscriptions (to keep up with the latest developments) and the skateboard related ones (skateboarders seem to be a fickle lot when it comes to blogs and news- information is sporadic and widespread so RSS is ideal to collate it all).
Now one of the things that originally made me such a fan of RSS was the fact that it meant you could read content without having to fight your way through badly designed sites to get to the information. This still applies with most of the skate stuff - the RSS feed works fine (usually because it is provided by default by the blog/cms they are using - some don’t even know it exists), but if you actually visit the site you are forced to view content in a tiny scrolling frame or buried deep in the site where you can’t find it, or go blind trying to read white text over a photographic background or other web design no-no’s that mostly died out in the 1990’s, but your average skateboarder hasn’t noticed. So in summary RSS still good for that.
The flipside of this is that most of the web design related blogs/ news sites are now well designed - who’d have thought it- and I get to look at, and use them too - less frequently because I just drop in from time to time, picking mostly at random from my old fashioned browser bookmarks. I also surf (that’s right surf) out from links on those sites and other crazy old fashioned web "browsing" behaviour.
So overall this is still an experiment in progress. RSS still rocks, but using it for oversubscribing to what is mostly web design hype (web 2.0? give me break!) still isn’t doing it for me.