In many ways they never left. But often they were ignored, left to collect cyber-dust and possibly go horribly out of date, needing many updates as they are revived. But they’re coming back. The Great Centralisation that started in the early 2000s with the advent of Facebook seems to be coming to an end. At least in my circles. Old blogs are being revived. New blogs are popping up. People are talking about RSS feeds again. Platforms. Favourite way of doing formatting.
It’s really magnificent.
But then – how do you keep track of everyone’s blogs? How do you know what to pay attention to, if there isn’t an algorithm that manages it all for you?
There are ways. And here are mine.
Some blogs let you subscribe to a newsletter that sends when the blogger posts a new posting. I do this with a few of my blogs. Not this one, though. It’s a nice way of doing it if you don’t hate emails. I don’t actually get many good personal emails any more – it’s mostly notifications – so getting an email full of delightful content from people I like is really refreshing.
RSS. Really Simple Syndication. A standard that’s been around for 26 years (yikes!) and not changed in the last 16. It’s a standardised XML file of the content on a website. There are many ways you can subscribe to an RSS feed. Your browser can (or should be able to) create what looks like a bookmark folder that updates with all the latest postings from a website. You can get a special feed-reader app on your phone. Or a feel-collecting page on a website. Or in an email client in a similar way to the bookmark folder in a browser.
Or my favourite way: RSS-to-email. You can run scripts in Git Hub that will gather all the updates from a collection of RSS feeds, format them neatly into an email and send it to you however often you like. I’ve got my email set up to be delivered around 6am, so it’s there to skim as I’m waking up. It’s a bit of a fiddle to configure initially but having updates delivered daily, without me needing to open Yet Another App. I’m checking emails anyway.
I’m trying to collect a nice blogroll here, too. It’s a work in progress, obviously.
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