RSS is great at looking forward, but I want to look back
RSS is great for keeping up with new posts, but terrible for catching up on old ones. I mean the ones published before you subscribed to the feed.
Am I holding it wrong? Because I would love for some way to dig through the archives of the many interesting folks that I’ve come across lately. I don’t care about the unread count being astronomical.
What I’ve been doing: randomly going into interesting person’s website, clicking around, stumbling on things. It’s fun, sure, but there’s so little method to it, too little for my tastes. How can I mark something as read, mark something as a favorite, curate the experience?
I’m genuinely not sure if I’m mocking or lamenting my predicament, if it can even be called that. A little bit of both. Maybe the issue is trying to impose structure, a sense of progression, onto something that should be viewed less as a book and more as a deck of cards. You take it out, pick a card, observe it and put it back in.
You’re never “done” with reading a blog. Even if its creator stops writing, there’s value in going back to its posts again and again. They can be a reference, a refuge, a respite, and probably even more words that start with the letter “r”. I guess you’re never “done” with a book either. They sit there, ready to be read again with a fresh mind, different perspectives and experiences coloring your interpretation. There’s something to going back to a book you once abandoned or begrudgingly made your way through only for it to click like it never did the first time.
Similarly, blogs are worth revisiting, but they feel at once more and less suited for that than books do. A book is finite, a blog can stretch on for years or decades. A book, more often than not, is beholden to some sort of structure. A blog can be many things at once and, like its author, can and probably will change over time. Even individual posts can change over time as the author revisits a subject, or they can even be deleted.
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