椒盐鸵鸟

RSS has became an almost obsolete concept that most of my friends nowadays never heard of, which is a shame. It’s simple, clean, accessible with correct setup, and most importantly, a highly productive system for information consumption.

Why do you need RSS

Compared to other information consumption form like feed from certain platforms (e.g. Instagram, Twitter) or newsletter, RSS (or atom) has a few clear advantages for consumers:

1. No sponsored content inserted and pretending to normal content in your feed.
2. You choose when to read rather getting newsletter pushed to a folder that you never get back to.
3. No personal information is collected when subscribing. Like receiving broadcast, publisher has no way to trace receiver.
4. No self-righteous algorithm telling you what order you should be reading your feed and making you miss the content you’re interested.
5. User friendly interface provided by Modern RSS clients like Inoreader or Feedly making subscribe and manage feed really easy.

As a content creator, making your site available through RSS means that:

1. More users will know when you have new content, no matter what platforms they usually use. Indie blogs are hard to keep track of without a universal feed, you can’t expect your readers to bookmark your website among tons of other blogs they’re interested in and check all of them everyday.
2. Less readers miss your content because they happen to not scrolling the social platform you’re on the exactly the moment you post.
3. Better performance on reader side and less stress on your server. RSS consuming platforms pull your content once and store on their platform, instead of your server feeding each individual visitor.

While popular blog/news website still generate RSS feed and are easy to subscribe, some of the content creators in this new era choose to publish their blog on non-conventional platform, like notion.

Notion blog is easy to setup and much more flexible than some simple article posting platform like telegra.ph or medium. Thanks to notion’s database system, content creators can customize their page with various views, filters and templates. Also it’s free for personal use. The only downside is, it doesn’t come with RSS feed.

Fortunately, automation workflow platform like Zapier provides an easy and free (for now) solution so that your notion blog (or frankly, any notion database) can generate RSS feed.

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