Moving On From RSS

Hey, long time between posts up in here. That’s unlikely to change until I (ideally) find an internship for summer in the next few weeks, but in the meantime I changed how I keep up with the web world thanks to my newly deemed-most-useful Firefox add-on, Morning Coffee. By that I mean I’m about four years late on this app, but it’s all about standing the test of time, yo.

Anyway, I’ve been using RSS for a few years now to keep up with some favorite sites, but after reading this Slate article, I realized I’m also tired of the RSS way of browsing — all the sites look the same, and as a result it’s impossible for these publications to tell me, “Hey man, read this particular story” in any fashion besides placing it at the top of the numerical publishing order. There’s the alternative of entering new URLs in tabs to visit each site manually, but that’s too slow and pointless.

Though it’s not the Slate-recommended way, Hot Coffee is a one-click way to open all the sites in tabs and view them how the authors want. Web 2.0 advocates would say I should be designing my own site-based experience, but if I didn’t care what the employees of a site think is important, I probably wouldn’t read their site in the first place. There’s the drawback of load time — it takes a full minute to load up all 20 of my indexed sites, but I’m willing to wait if I feel more drawn in to the experience. And finally, in a counter-intuitive point as a web user, viewing the site display ads certainly makes the ad-buyers and publishers happy. It’s gotta be a rare attitude among web users, but I do want to help out the industry playaz when I can.

So if you’re an RSS devotee — a “superuser”, as we used to call them due to their likelihood to be more tech-savvy — I took a brief tech step backwards, but I’m more engaged as a result. Hook it up.