RSS Feeds - What I Wish I'd Done Sooner

For a long time I had this routine: open browser, check tech blog, check news site, check forum, check another blog, find nothing new, repeat in two hours. Anyone who’s ever been into a niche corner of the internet probably knows the feeling - the constant, low-key checking, just in case. Glad a friend laughed me into RSS before I burned more mornings on it.

A friend asked me one day why I wasn’t just using RSS. I told him I figured RSS had quietly died sometime around 2010. He laughed and pointed out that it never actually did. It just stopped being trendy.

Two weeks of using it later, I was a convert.

RSS in Plain English, After My Friend Called Me Out

The week after my friend called me out, I subscribed to maybe eight sites and opened Inoreader instead of my usual tab loop. First morning: one list, everything new since yesterday. No sponsored post pretending to be a friend. No “people you may know.” Just titles in order.

Technically, RSS is a feed URL each site publishes. Your reader polls those URLs and stacks the updates. When a blog posts, the feed updates. You don’t visit ten homepages to find out nothing changed.

That’s it. No algorithm. No “for you” page. No ads (unless the site puts them in their feed, which is rare). Just chronological, raw “here’s what’s new on the sites I care about.”

Same idea as email newsletters, but without cluttering your inbox.

What Actually Changed After Two Weeks

Three things, after years of refreshing the same five sites like a nervous habit:

I stopped hunting for content. Instead of visiting ten sites to see if anything was new, I open one app and see exactly what’s new across all of them. The hunting time goes to zero. Week one I still opened the old tabs anyway - muscle memory is stubborn.

Nothing slips past me anymore. Algorithms decide what they want you to see. RSS shows you everything from sources you chose. If a blog you love only posts once every three months, you’ll still see that post - it won’t be buried. I missed one post that way at first because I hadn’t subscribed yet - found it a week later when someone linked it on Facebook. Added the feed. Hasn’t happened since.

My social media use went down. A lot of what I was doing on Twitter and Reddit was just trying to keep up with stuff. RSS does that better, faster, and without the endless-scroll trap.

Pick a Reader (Don’t Overthink This)

There are dozens of RSS readers. Most are fine. I use Inoreader - the free tier gives you 150 feeds, which sounds tight but is actually way more than most people use. Most realistic personal setups end up around 20-30.

A few others I’ve tried or had recommended: Feedly (clean, popular), NetNewsWire (Mac/iOS, free, open source), Reeder (paid, nicer to look at). Try whichever - they all do the same core job. You can export and switch readers anytime, so the choice isn’t permanent.

I wasted a Saturday once comparing readers side by side instead of subscribing to five feeds. Pick one in ten minutes. You can export OPML later if you hate it.

Sign up, ignore most of the menus for now, and let’s add some feeds.

Finding Feeds for Sites You Read

This is the part that trips people up. RSS used to be advertised everywhere; now most sites hide it. A few ways I find them:

Look for an RSS icon. Usually in the footer, sometimes the sidebar, sometimes a “Subscribe” link.

Try /feed at the end of the URL. This works for almost every WordPress site - and WordPress runs about 40% of the web. My own blog is jorap.com/blog/index.xml; most Hugo sites expose /index.xml on the section you care about.

Just paste the homepage URL into your reader. Inoreader and most modern readers will auto-discover the feed for you.

Worst case, Google it. Search “site name RSS feed” - someone has usually already figured it out.

I pasted a homepage into Inoreader once and got nothing - turned out the site had killed RSS years ago and only published on Substack. Not every site has a feed. When auto-discover fails, I either subscribe to their newsletter or accept I’m not following them in RSS.

Organizing Without Going Overboard

The classic beginner mistake is dumping every feed into one giant list, and the second mistake is the opposite - building an elaborate folder hierarchy with twelve nested categories.

What works for me is three folders:

• Daily - WTA scores, one or two tech blogs I actually read, anything time-sensitive
• Weekly - long reads, newsletters, blogs that post once a month if I’m lucky
• Fun - comics, board-game rules blogs, design inspiration, the wind-down stuff

That’s it. If you can’t decide which folder something goes in, just pick one. You can move it later.

My first attempt was worse: twelve nested folders named after moods. I spent more time filing feeds than reading them. Collapsed everything into three buckets in one sitting and never looked back.

A Reading Rhythm That Doesn’t Burn You Out

The other beginner trap is subscribing to everything you’ve ever read. You’ll end up with 300 unread items every morning and quit RSS within a week.

A couple of rules I follow now:

If I skip a feed three times in a row, I unsubscribe. No guilt. Life’s short.

“Mark all as read” is a feature, not a failure. If I’ve been away for a few days and there are 200 unread posts waiting, I don’t catch up - I just clear it and start fresh. Whatever I missed wasn’t going to change my life.

Daily folder with morning coffee. Weekly folder on Sunday night. That’s the whole routine. Maybe fifteen minutes total.

Problems I Hit in the First Month

A site with no findable feed. It probably does have one, just hidden. I hit a couple where I genuinely couldn’t find it, and RSS Bridge generated one for me. Kill the Newsletter does the same trick for email-only newsletters.

Two hundred unread items and a vague sense of dread. I marked them all as read and nothing bad happened. That’s the whole fix.

Forgetting the app existed. I put Inoreader on my phone’s home screen where Instagram used to be. Swapping a habit worked; adding one didn’t.

The Quieter Benefits I Didn’t Expect

RSS made me more intentional about what I read. When you have to actively choose to follow something, you stop accidentally absorbing every viral thread someone retweets at you.

I also started discovering smaller, weirder, better blogs. The kind of independent writing that algorithms don’t surface but other bloggers link to. RSS rewards that whole layer of the internet that social media mostly buries.

The first weird blog I found that way was a one-person Hugo site about board game rules edge cases - zero chance an algorithm would have pushed that to me. I subscribed because a post I liked linked to it. That’s the layer social mostly buries.

Clearing a feed to zero feels like finishing a small chore - satisfying in a way scrolling never is.

Try It for a Week

RSS is not exciting. It will not get you likes. It’s older than most of the apps on your phone and looks like it.

But it works, and it’s been quietly working for over twenty years. I stopped checking Twitter for news I could have pulled from fifteen feeds I picked myself.

Start with five feeds and three folders. I still open Inoreader with my morning coffee, and I’m glad Instagram isn’t on my home screen anymore.