Intentional Consumption and why I am using RSS in 2024 and beyond
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TL;DR: I have an RSS Feed of my 10 most recent posts. Feel free to subscribe here: https://lannonbr.com/feed.xml
Over this year, I've been doing a lot of thinking of what types of content I want to be consuming and how I get that content. A solution at least for news / blog based content is going back to a relatively old syndication method: RSS. I was a fan of apps like Feedly & Google Reader back when I was in college, and now in 2024 I decided to come back to it. I currently use Readwise Reader to get my content.
Rather than having algorithms on social networks tell me what content to consume, I can find websites of companies, organizations, and people, add their RSS feeds to Readwise, and then get a chronological feed of the content. Alongside this, I am thinking about in the future of trying to narrow when I decide to consume media, and for the majority of the content in my RSS reader, it isn't going to go away or be outdated within a course of hours. So limiting when I open up my reader could reduce the chance of me scrolling for hours through content I may or may not care about. I still think social networks do have their place, but I wanted to be intentional and flip the script of instead of having Reddit or Twitter tell me what content they think I want to consume, I can be deliberate of wanting to consume certain articles and news.
As well, I wanted to do the same with my own content and make it accessible via RSS. With 11ty's 3.0 update, they made a 2.0 version of their RSS Plugin that made it extremely simple to generate a feed. So now the last 10 posts will always be accessible from my feed.