Technology has changed a lot since RSS first appeared. And it’s questionable how much a place it still has today. But the SitePoint forum does have RSS.
For example.
http://www.sitepoint.com/community/latest.rss
http://www.sitepoint.com/community/t/quotes-that-may-actually-be-true/103215.rss
I use RSS to keep up with all manner of sites.
But I must admit, SitePoint isn’t one of them.
I use RSS to keep up with everything! When Google Reader died, I quickly jumped to Feedly and have never looked back. When they offered their PRO Lifetime account for $99, I quickly jumped on that too.
RSS is huge for me. That is where I literally get 99% of the news I follow around technology, life hacks, parenting tips, etc. (I even subscribe to Sitepoint’s RSS feeds, so I can get @Pullo’s “This week in X” – which was renamed to something I can’t recall right now…)
I hope it doesn’t go away, as I absolutely love utilizing RSS feeds. I’ve got hundreds of them that I’m subscribed to and I get through them all within an hour or two a couple times a day.
On Our Radar (co-written with Paul Wilkins)
I’m currently cross-posting my roundups to the forums (Community), but this will become moot after the article commenting integration.
I use RSS to keep up with everything! When Google Reader died, I quickly jumped to Feedly and have never looked back. When they offered their PRO Lifetime account for $99, I quickly jumped on that too.
I’ve tried to use Feedly so many times. I don’t know if it’s my lack of ability to keep it culled, or that I’m not curating which content or specific feeds I input well enough, but to me it’s still a bit too much of a firehose of crap that I don’t want. I’m still working on it (this week, in fact, I’ve cleared it out and am setting up again. I’d love for it to work for me.
I’ve got all of my feeds organized into folders (which helps). I primarily cycle through the “All” in the Full Articles view, but if I’m in a rush, I’ll use the Title Only view or go to the specific folder of interest.
Here is a screenshot of how I have it organized (and you can see the beginnings of my tags – I think I have close to 70 tags):
I used to. Then people started killing them off. I was a huge fan of the iGoogle home page. When that died I tried some alternatives and none of them cut it. It seems like a dead tech. People don’t really use them and sites don’t like them because they cut in to ad revenue.
Some were really bad and intrusive for no reason… Like Feedly. lol
“We need to install this software and the blood of your first born to show you a text feed.”
No thanks. I just want the text feed. I already have too many plugins.
Has it changed? I’m not really a privacy freak so much as just a power user who throws too much at my browser already.
Yes, it changed. It is no longer plugin based, it is all web browser based now (much like Google Reader was).
So far, the only RSS feed that I access (and only at work, not at home) is the NASA Image Of The Day feed.
Anything else, I’m pretty much OCD about checking manually.
That’s good. I never understood why they needed it. It seemed like overkill.
Honestly though, now that I think about it… I think Reddit and HN has taken over my need for RSS feeds now.
Short answer, it saved them a lot of cost up front. They could use the same codebase to launch an Android App and a Google Chrome Plugin (or fairly close) using a limited set of hardware. Once they got more funding they quickly built the web-browser solution they have now.
From a business perspective, it made sense. From a usability sense, it didn’t, but once they got the funds to buy the hardware to go web-based, they did it immediately and did it well.
I don’t subscribe to as many feeds as I used to, but I still subscribe to some. I use Newsblur. Used to use sage way back, then google reader. I also like reddit (the apple sub reddit anyway)
You know, I just now started browsing Reddit - only used it before for specific items linked to me. I’m finding it to be… immersive. Probably need to stay away from it, don’t need even more time sinks…
It can be… distracting… but thankfully not as much of a chronologic black hole as, say, FB.
That’s good. I almost never login to FB now, so dodging that one.
I deleted every (anti-)social account I’ve ever had - FB, Twitter, Google+. That was months ago… and I’ve felt like a huge weight has been removed from my shoulders, ever since.
Yeah. I barely use Facebook, but am reluctant to completely discard it. Google+ for me is just a profile page, and nothing more, if even that. Twitter… I curate content to it, and I read some… but to be honest I could quit it too. Maybe that’d be better off, who knows. When I was working for myself it simply wasn’t an option, as a business who wants social media advice along with their website work aren’t thrilled with “yeah I hate that crap” but now that I’m not… /ponders
It’s very addictive. 
There are a lot of really good programming and web development ones.
Then language specific ones. /r/php is pretty toxic, I’d stay away from there even if you’re a PHP fan. Not sure about the Ruby ones. /r/java and /r/scala are pretty good. /r/dotnet is too. Of course /r/lolphp is pretty funny if you’re not a php fan.
Plus like HN, every once and a while you’ll find minor celebs in our industry having conversations there. [Paul Irish] (http://www.sitepoint.com/podcast-95-the-undetectables-with-paul-irish/) for instance hangs out in /r/frontend alot and I’ve seen a few others.
Overall, I don’t really like commenting too much there. But I did get my first gold last week. (gold is when someone pays $4 to like your comment, it gives you some neat perks) This is actually my second account, I deleted my first and decided to not comment as much. I fell into too many troll traps.
Google+ for me is just a profile page, and nothing more, if even that. Twitter
I try to use G+ more, but it’s very forgettable. Mostly because it’s not very active. I’ve really only found it good for finding good talks/articles about very specific subjects.
I choose to set up rss feeds directly to my Outlook desktop client. @mitteneague Why would the place of rss be questionable today? Are you supposing it’s place has been usurped by social media? Social media is about people, rss is about content. If rss is ever going to become redundant, it certainly wont be because of social media.
