Blog Feeds

No this isn't another platform.

You don't sign up here.

You just write what's on your mind, respond to an idea, post a recipe, or share a photo. It's blogs, but perhaps not in the way you would normally think of blogs.

It just takes three things to participate:

Starting a blog is actually a lot simpler than what you're probably thinking. This doesn't have to be some well polished highly viewed monetization machine, or even something professional or formal. It's just a simple website where you can casually talk about whatever you want to talk about! It can be long, short, a list of small things, or just a quote. It should be how you talk with other people in your own life, or how you communicate with the outside world. It should be you on a page. Here's a few places you can make a blog that are RSS enabled:

RSS is actually already familiar to you if you have ever subscribed to a newsletter. You put your email into someone’s website, and when they have updates, they send you emails to your inbox so you can stay in the loop. In the case of RSS, you have a dedicated app, called an RSS reader usually, and you can put in someone’s website into the app to subscribe. When they make a new post, just open your news reader app, and their posts will be retrieved and ready to read. Some reader apps even let you make folders and tags to organize blogs you are subscribed to, similar to how an email app lets you make folders to sort mail. Would highly recommend trying a few of the apps or services and seeing which works best!

This takes us to our final point: Feeds. You can probably get away with just the first two items and then sharing it with people you already know, but what about meeting or talking to people you don't know? That's where Feeds come in. The idea is to create another page on your blog that has all the RSS feeds you're subscribed to. By keeping this public and always up to date, someone can visit your page, find someone new and follow them. Perhaps that person also has a feeds page, and the cycle continues until there is a natural and organic network of people all sharing with each other. So if you have a blog, consider making a feeds page and sharing it! If your RSS reader supports OPML file exports and imports, perhaps you can share that file as well to make it easier to share your feeds.

The best part about blog feeds? It's just an idea. There's no central authority. There's no platform. No massive tech giant trying to take your data. It's just you, basic web standards, and the people you care about.