Subscribing

Blogging has recently been increasing in popularity, but it is doing so under different names. It is increasingly driven by platforms like substack that do not emphasise the writing process in the way that blogging has traditionally done. Instead its focus is on distribution, on making sure that what you write is actually getting to people who want to read it, and optionally are willing to pay for the privilege.

The main way it distributes this is through email. As I have written before: “the greatest damage to email has been done by noreply@domain.com”. I do not want my inbox to be filled with an increasing number of blogs or articles, and I also don’t want to read them in the interface that I read my email in. Thankfully, there is a standard supported almost everywhere that allows you to subscribe to this type of irregularly-updated content, although you may not have heard of it: RSS.

RSS readers allow you to list a series of websites that you would like to subscribe to, and will check these links periodically (or whenever you tell it to) for new articles. It is supported by practically all news organisations, youtube, reddit, and many independent websites. Even substack supports RSS, although they don’t display it publicly. Because it is an open standard, you can use a multitude of different apps or websites to collect and read your feeds through; I use feeder on my smartphone and elfeed, a package for GNU Emacs, on my GNU/Linux computers. If you still want to get things delivered to your email, there are services that will do this for you.

Many RSS readers will be able to find an RSS links on a website for you, but there are also websites like RSS Lookup that can find them. My website not only has a main RSS feed containing all my posts, but also more specific ones containing only the content with certain tags. This exists for many other websites as well, where perhaps a news column has its own feed so that you can subscribe to just that. The Economist for example has feeds for all of its sections that you can find by appending “/rss.xml” to the URL. My Emacs feed is also part of Sacha Chua’s Planet Emacslife that you can not only subscribe to, but also read on the web directly.