The RSS revival

Google Reader was probably the most mourned Google product of all times. When it was discontinued back in the day, for many people RSS as a standard for news aggregiation died with it. For a while, there was no web-based killer app replacement, and slowly, the many orange, wifiesque RSS symbols that once were ubiquious on websites large and small disappeared, often together with the feeds they tried to advertise.

Evil tounges may say this was exactly what Google intended to do, because RSS made people surf aimlessly /less/, and thus lowered ad revenue.

It certainly worked for me - what once was a pretty straightforward look over the headlines, picking out the stories that really interested me, and discarding the rest, now became a morning productivity trap.

I’m in Month 6 of my emacs transformation, getting away from Vi (which also is an excellent editor). For a few weeks now, I am using elfeed, an emacs plugin, for feed reading - and it works great. If you like the minimalism and simplicity of text mode, if you want RSS to play a bigger role in your online life again … I do encourage you to try it. [A quick overview about it’s capabilities has been written by noonker][https://noonker.github.io/posts/2020-04-22-elfeed/].