Don’t let RSS rob you

For a “dead” technology, RSS is currently stirring up a veritable storm in a teacup. Antonio thinks Your RSS Reader Is Robbing You, because it doesn’t let you experience the effort someone put into styling their site just so. It robs you of the personality behind the words. And a good thing too, says Christian Cleberg, who finds your choices of fonts and colours too jarring. Then comes a small flurry of additional posts leaning one way or the other, and through them all, one key fact emerges. Kev Quirk puts it this way: “I don’t think our RSS readers our robbing us - we can have our cake and eat it.” That is, you can read some sites in your reader and visit others where they live. In fact Newsblur (and others probably) will allow you to choose on a per-feed basis whether to see the plain text or the styled version. I’m forced to conclude that even in the world of independent web sites, clickbait titles exist and work. I mean, here I am, baited. Also posted on IndieNews.