Frankensteinke

RSS feeds, or how to know about things before everyone else

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a 25 year old technology that helps you keep track of when websites publish new content.

A lot of websites have RSS feeds, and sometimes even social media profiles have RSS feeds. If you aren't familiar with either of these, it's likely that you've encountered RSS feeds in a different form: podcasts.

RSS readers

Your favorite podcast app is essentially what we'd call an "RSS reader", but specifically for podcasts. It lets you search for podcasts to subscribe to, and keeps you updated whenever they publish new episodes.

There are also RSS readers that you can use to stay updated with written content on the web, like blogs. Feedbin is one of the most popular ones and seems to have many features, but it comes at the cost of a monthly subscription fee. Feedly is another popular RSS reader. It's free, and works well enough for my uses.

Finding good RSS feeds

Having an RSS reader downloaded is one thing, but if you don't have any subscriptions, it's like having a podcast app without subscribing to any podcasts.

An RSS reader is only as powerful as the collection of feeds that you've subscribed to.

It can all start with a single feed. If you read a post by a web designer that you really liked, maybe that designer is a good first person to subscribe to. The web is built on links, so it's very likely that on one of that designer's posts, you find a link to a blog by another cool designer.

Another good source of potential websites to subscribe to is weekly email subscription lists. I subscribe to Accessibility Weekly, and I have come across authors on their weekly emails that I've subscribed to.

If you have a particular person that you like to follow in tech and they have a Mastodon account, you can also subscribe to their Mastodon posts on your RSS reader. Do this with caution, because it can also suck up non-technical social posts that you may be less interested in reading.

I'll also provide a list of starter suggestions in the following sections.

Suggested RSS feeds to follow

Here are some of my favorite feeds to follow. RSS feeds can be very personal, so it could be worth trying some of these out and unsubscribing if they don't resonate with you.

Accessibility

CSS

  • Picallili for focused articles about modern CSS
  • Ahmad Shaheed for their famous interactive breakdowns of single CSS properties

General front end web development

  • Heydon Pickering for their recent ambitious series breaking down every single HTML element, and other random (often funny) takes
  • Dave Rupert for the type of old-school front end web development that got me into the industry, and information about web components
  • Manuel Matuzovic for their 100+ day series breaking down modern CSS properties, and other posts about accessibility and HTML

Web performance

  • Infrequently Noted for extremely ambitious, well researched multi-part posts about performance and the catastrophic effects of modern JavaScript bundle sizes
  • Taylor Hunt for their refreshingly eccentric takes on modern JavaScript frameworks

Odds and ends

  • A List Apart for a publication that has been posting quality writing on the web for as long as I've been working in the industry
  • Amy Hupe for content design and design systems writing
  • Kellen Elliott-McCrea for broader posts about engineering and leadership