RSS, email and social media connection

RSS was meant to be a different way to present content. RSS technology evolution in online publishing promised to make it really easy to not only publish regular updates to web-based content, but also keep track of a large number of your favorite websites or blogs, without having to remember to check each site manually or clutter your email inbox.

It seems that RSS did not fully live up to the promise for end user perspective. It is useful technology that I use in this blog (http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/feed/). RSS feeds have been very popular, but are are somewhat fading in popularity, even to point that some articles expect death of RSS. Nowadays the trend is that people follow Twitter and Facebook instead of RSS. One of the best aspects of email subscriptions (and Twitter) is that you can actually see who’s taken interest in your work. 

Is RSS dead or not? To me, anytime someone says a tech is dead it usually means that tech is not very interesting to discuss anymore, or isn’t seeing the most innovative companies doing new things with it. Ultimately RSS will stick around as a way for content services to talk to each other (it does that well). The protocol is still very much alive, while people can get the data from other means than RSS from various services, very often RSS is the method that gets the data to the service people use. On thing to remember is to make sure that your RSS feed content is valid, I tested my feed to pass the validation service at https://validator.w3.org/feed/.

I still offer RSS feed at http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/feed/. I also post updates to Twitter and Facebook.

If you prefer to get update on material posted to this blog to clutter your email box (I post here quite often), there are many RSS to mail services.  From various alternatives I found out that Blogtrottr worked the way I liked. You can get information on new postings to your e-mail box using Blogtrottr by giving URL http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/feed/ and your e-mail address to this service, and selecting feed type (Realtime works well).