Around 2007, I started building out a collection of RSS feeds to a lot of blogs that I followed. Over the next 4-5 years, this number got past 100. I had them all added to my Firefox Bookmarks Bar and used an extension to fetch the latest updates from those blogs. It was the perfect setup.
Then, Google Reader became popular. I started using it and also tried a few other feed readers. As some of these apps shutdown, I lost interest in keeping track of the blogs and ever since I’ve been lazy to rebuild my RSS feeds.
Fast forward to 2022, I discovered NetNewsWire, an awesome OSS feed reader that I’ve come to love. It’s simple, efficient, and straight forward.
I sync my feeds via iCloud and this lets me access my feeds on the macOS and iOS clients. After using NetNewsWire for 3+ years, I am yet to use most of its features. I’ll have to look into which ones make sense to me.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve managed to get the number of tracked blogs up to 45. I still have long ways to go, but this is great progress. I plan on publishing these blog links on a dedicated page on IAM.MT. I’m really digging the small web movement.
Fun fact: I wrote my own feed reader before I discovered NetNewsWire. It was via an automated script that’d check for updates at a set interval and push them to folder offline on my iCloud drive. It was simple and accessible across all of my devices immediately. I just killed the project due to lack of time and I didn’t like downloading raw feed files to my iCloud directory. It was meant as temporary solution anyway.