Newspaper withdrawal at the breakfast table

Mornings haven’t been quite the same around the house since Feb. 26–the last one that started with a print copy of the Washington Post landing somewhere near our front walk, making less of a thud than it once did, sometime before dawn.

That marked the end of a streak of Post home delivery that had run decades, going back to my first apartments out of college in Arlington and D.C. The wanton destruction of much of my old newsroom, followed by my seeing the sad results of Jeff Bezos’s act of civic vandalism and then facing an imminent renewal of our print subscription, pushed me to terminate that streak–in sorrow, not anger.

(The Post’s site didn’t even offer me a discount on my way out.)

Since then, the demise of a daily habit of analog news reading has left me with a breakfast-table problem: What do I read instead to ensure I still start the day by informing myself? Ideally, without bringing a touchscreen device to the table?

One early answer had been collecting dust on other household surfaces: the print magazines we get.

I’m one of the many people who subscribed to Wired in early 2025 in appreciation of that publication’s outstanding coverage of the Trump administration’s abuses of power. But until the dead-tree edition of the Post wasn’t occupying space on the breakfast table, I let copies of that magazine pile up.

We also have back issues of such other print mags as the Air & Space Museum’s Air & Space quarterly and the UVA and Georgetown alumni magazines my wife and I get. I’ve been reminded that they’re worth reading with a morning coffee–among other things, I now know that the coffee company I keep buying from at Costco was founded by another Hoya.

And there’s a slightly less-portable form of printed media, books. My current read is my Post friend Sara Kehaulani Goo’s memoir Kuleana, in which she unpacks her Hawaiian heritage and her family’s struggles to hold on to the last of some ancestral land.

If I must turn to a touchscreen, I’ve realized that my digital reading should be one of the most newspaper-like forms of online publishing, RSS. Catching up with favorite sites via that online-syndication format seems healthier than flipping over to social media.

I can also read the Washington Post on the web or in its Android or iPad apps–my Arlington and D.C. library cards provide free online access, notwithstanding the occasional glitch renewing that freebie. And yet I don’t turn to what I think of as my alma mater of journalism as often as I did when I paid for it. I feel a little bad about that.

RSS: The Forgotten Technology That Gave Us Control Over the Web

The Death of RSS Was the Death of the Real Internet

By Sydney Butler, Published 20 hours ago

RSS might not be dead in the strict sense of the word. After all, we still have the How-To Geek RSS feed and people still use it. It’s just that RSS has sharply declined to almost nothing, and it’s simply not how people get their content pushed to them anymore.

Which is a real shame, because RSS represents the best parts of the web and the internet as a whole that we’ve largely lost.

The Golden Age of RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was invented by three smart folks at Netscape. You remember Netscape, right? Ironically, Netscape would pretty much leave RSS to the rest of the web community to develop, and develop it they did. RSS was pretty quickly embraced by online publishers as an easy way to push their latest content to readers.

RSS was beautifully simple. Any website could publish a feed, and any user could subscribe to it with a reader. No algorithms. No gatekeepers.

Why RSS Mattered

The brilliance of RSS was how it leveled the playing field. A major publication with thousands of staff writers and a small hobbyist blog with a single post every few weeks looked exactly the same in your feed.

You are the curator of your feed, and have ultimate control of what ends up in your RSS reader of choice. RSS also solved a problem we’ve never really fixed since: discovery and distribution without middlemen.

In those early days of the web, if you wanted to know the latest stuff, you physically had to hit that refresh button manually. Sure, you could subscribe to an email newsletter, but that meant receiving your headlines at set intervals rather than as they were published.

RSS is a simple technology that lets us change the web from a passive resource to an active, relevant flow of information that we control. I remember back in the early 2000s when I was still messing around with Rainmeter, I always had an RSS widget that kept me in the loop on topics relevant to my interests or my studies.

The Decline of RSS

The biggest sign that RSS wasn’t really used much anymore came when browsers started dropping RSS support. Google Chrome scrapped RSS features in 2013 and a few years later Firefox followed suit in 2018. With built-in RSS reader functionality dropped, most people using these browsers wouldn’t even know it was an option, and are less likely to jump through hoops to set up a dedicated reader, even if it is easy.

Though I’m not blaming the browser developers. They wouldn’t have dropped RSS features if lots of people were using them. It’s a death spiral where usage declined beyond the point it was worth maintaining the feature, and without the feature usage is unlikely to recover.

Why did RSS use decline so much? Probably several reasons. Some sites stopped running their feeds, we moved over to apps that have push notifications, and websites can now also send push notifications through your browsers—something they ask for every time you visit unless you disable that feature.

We have plenty of solutions to getting instant updates from the web that don’t require a manual setup, and often don’t even wait for us to ask, but get in your face.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: RSS: The Forgotten Technology That Gave Us Control Over the Web

#2025 #America #Blogging #Blogs #History #Libraries #Library #Reading #ReallySimpleSyndication #RSS #Science #SharingInformation #Technology #UnitedStates #WebTechnology #Writing

💭️ I Don't Always RSS | July 08, 2025 - 10:30 p.m.

I don't always RSS, but ... wait. Yes, I do! Ask for RSS today!

https://readbeanicecream.surge.sh/chatter/#i-dont-always-rss-july-08-2025-1030-pm

#tech #technology #rss #rssfeed #ReallySimpleSyndication #socialmedia

Mastodon has a really cool #RssFeed .

( #Rss is #ReallySimpleSyndication .)

New blog post, 'Falling back in love with the humble RSS feed' - thank you for the tip @alpower, I am now a big NetNewsWire fan: https://www.fionamacneill.co.uk/post/2023/12/humble-rss-feed/

#RSS #ReallySimpleSyndication #Blogging #Podcasts #Reflection #PartyLikeIts2005

Does the Mastodon RSS endpoint documentation live somewhere? I'm trying to figure out if it is possible to add queries to RSS feed links.

La documentation sur les endpoints RSS de Mastodon se trouve-t-elle quelque part? Je cherche à comprendre s'il est possible d'ajouter des requêtes aux liens RSS.

#FediTips #Mastodon #ReallySimpleSyndication #RSS

Premiers tests ;)

L'import d'un (vieux) fichier OPML fonctionne... mais ces triangles warning rouges... !?#$& Surement des flux qui n'existent plus mais quelqu'un sait comment nettoyer ça facilement ?

#FreshRSS #RSS #Flux #Zaclys #libre #opensource #ReallySimpleSyndication