Yesterday, Chris Coyier asked a question on Twitter: “Who’s gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed? I’m gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed.” Chris then attached a screen recording of him scrolling down his massive list of RSS feeds of personal websites.
Who’s gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed? I’m gonna read your personal blog because it has an RSS feed. pic.twitter.com/mtcyKhEVet
— Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) January 7, 2020
This reminded me of the fact that I had wanted to clean up my own list of RSS feeds for quite a while and so I spent some time today doing exactly that. And while I was at it, I added a few new sites, too. The result is not as impressive as Chris’s collection but it is a great improvement.
While I was updating the list, I also noticed how impressive and wonderful it is to see so many personal websites out there. The quality of the sites really is breathtaking, as is the variety of different approaches, designs, and topics. Seeing all those sites so closely together shows just how diverse and rich our community really is. And the richness of this “personal-website-verse” will only increase as more and more people realize that Medium might not be the ideal place for their content and start publishing on their own sites.
RSS can be a great way to connect to other people and their work and it is thus one of the technologies that can weave our network of personal sites more tightly together. So if you want to add a bunch of personal sites to your feed reader, go ahead and grab an OPML export of my list on Github. I will update it from time to time, too, because RSS is, obviously, not dead yet.
~
