![]() ![]() They're all polished, easy to use, and put the content you want to read front and center. Thankfully, as it's a decades-old standard, there are a few great apps that have thoroughly cracked this problem. You don't want to have to deal with weird UI quirks or even really interact with your reader app-it's all about seamlessly mainlining as much high-quality content as possible. Good RSS services have a weirdly challenging job: they have to gather content from loads of different places and display it for you, all while getting out of the way as much as possible. It means I don't have to constantly check and see if Derek Sivers or Tynan has published a new post-it just pops up in my feeds. I follow a few dozen tech sites, but it's also really great for following blogs that only publish a few times a year. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.Īs a tech writer, I rely on my RSS app to keep me up to date on what's going on. ![]() We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. Very nicely done, but it’s odd that it’s such a hidden capability.All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. I choose “View All RSS Articles” and now they’re displayed from newest-to-oldest in a unified window: You can see that there are 322 new articles in my RSS feed collection and how they’re distribute between the different feeds I’ve bookmarked (e.g. The “View All RSS Articles” option shows up automatically if you drop a “feed:” URL into a folder!Įven better, add a few, wait a while until there’s new material in those feeds, and you’ll find that the folder is no longer called “RSS”, but actually also includes a count of the number of new articles in those feeds: Save the bookmark in the new folder and now when you click on that folder in your Bookmarks Bar (or bookmark menu, if you put it there) you’ll find that it magically expands to offer more than just that one bookmark:Īhhh…. Here’s the magic part, though…Ĭhoose Bookmarks –> Add Bookmark… to bookmark the Dave On Film RSS feed and you’ll see this: If you click on the new folder you’ll see that it’s empty. Remember that it’ll contain all of your RSS feeds, not just one, so we don’t want to, for example, call it “Dave On Film”. Give it the name “RSS”, perhaps, or just about anything else that your heart desires and that’ll make sense to you. If you’re going to add it to your Bookmarks Bar so it’s convenient for later access, simply Ctrl-Click on the bar itself: But you don’t want to just create a bookmark, but instead a bookmark folder within which you’ll save all your RSS feeds.įirst you need to create the folder. Now here’s the key step: to subscribe to this RSS feed you need to bookmark it. Nice, with lots of useful tools on the right side to tweak and fine-tune how you want the feed displayed. Now you’ll see that you’ve moved into the Safari RSS viewer, complete with a “feed://” URL being displayed: Now let’s go to a page that has an RSS feed available, like my film blog Dave On Film! Go there in Safari and the top address box will look like this: You can enable it with View –> Show Bookmarks Bar. There are two parts to working with RSS feeds: subscribing to an individual feed and reading your combined set of feeds, and I’ll start right out by suggesting that if you don’t already use the Bookmark Bar in Safari (the narrow strip of your favorite site bookmarks that appears immediately below the address bar) then now’s a good time to get into the habit of using it. The problem is, it’s not easy to figure out how to do so, as you have learned, In fact, the RSS capabilities are so incredibly subtle and obscure that I wouldn’t be surprised if less than 1% of Safari users even know they’re there, let alone know how to work with them. Actually, Apple’s Safari web browser has been able to work with RSS feeds for quite a while. ![]()
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