I like RSS as a programmer, the technology is good. I hate it as a designer, the UX is just awful. There are too many things that are just wrong. And the whole thing that works great in theory, breaks when it meets the real human being. Unless that human being is either fine with being obsessed with reading everything from everyone they subscribed to. Or, the opposite, they just don’t care about the unread count to be some absurd number.
I’m the second one, I’m trying to be the second one. Because in reality I’m the first type. I never used RSS properly since the murder of Google Reader. I tried various software solutions, but none worked.
I’d write about that in full, some other time.
At some point, I found NetNewsWire for my iPhone. While being a piece of art, I do like the software, it does not solve the UX issue for me. Not in the slightest. So my solution is quite simple, outside of the default RSS feeds the developer provides (I haven’t removed them by the way, I like curated feeds), I subscribed to a handful of people. I added them to my iCloud account, so they’d sync.
A couple of days back, I found one blog I liked, and tried to add its xml feed to my reader. Didn’t work. The reader gave me this weird description, something saying ‘I cannot add this blog,’ making me sure the blog just made the feed incorrectly. ‘It should be incompatible with this reader,’ I thought.
Today I realised the irony of that. The issue was completely different: I was subscribed to the person already. I subscribed months ago. It’s just that they don’t post too often, and so I have never been reading them from the reader. For you to get the context, I’m subscribed to just five people. And all of them aren’t frequent writers.
I just missed it that I was subscribed to the blog already.