Previously on me
Like every other engineer, I expect to learn new technologies and techniques or just read random news to broaden my horizons. Thus, I subscribed to many bloggers and mail newsletters and was determined to read them daily, dreaming that I would become fantastic someday. Time passed, and one day, I found out that I had over 40 unread emails in my inbox, none of which were commercial or scams. All of them were the newsletters I subscribed to.
Then I realised that newsletter subscriptions are not the right way to form a reading habit, at least for me. What's worse is that assuming that the future self would read them, I never slid them right to mark them read, resulting in a horrifying yet pretentious mailbox.
As for the reasons why things above were happening, I concluded the following:
- The nature of the mailbox makes journals hard to manage and track. Once an email gets clicked on, it is marked read, so no matter how many journals remain unread, you click on an email, read a few journals, close the app, leave, and say goodbye to the rest forever.
- The reading experience could have been better. Daily light readings would have many distractions; they might be inline links within some omitted explanations to Wikipedia pages or other journals referred to at the end. Anyway, the amount of information makes you lose track of where you were and where you came from, and finally, you forget that you were randomly browsing a newsletter.
I am the kind of person who gets worried that something vital has been missed if any line remains unread, which is beyond strange and bothering me, considering that I have problems reading.
So, I started exploring the perfect way to gather and read journals.
I implemented RSS to my blog, but it failed to change me
Over a year ago, I wrote a journal about how I implemented the auto-generated RSS functionality to my blog. However, the fact is that implementation failed to change me to using RSS tools to gather and manage journals and newsletters, which is beyond bizarre.
Looking back and trying really hard to find out why (I really am), I concluded that, back then, I might not have understood either what RSS was or what it was for, but I followed the tutorials without thinking. After the coding, I built it, deployed it, and confirmed the existence of generated XML files. I was like, 'Everything seems fine,' and let it go.
What's so good about using an RSS tool
Let's talk back to the usage of RSS tools. I am using Reeder, the first RSS tool I have ever used. I did some research on Google (basically just read some RSS tools comparing journals and made the decision by its user interface).
Compared to all the drawbacks of email newsletters I mentioned above, RSS tools have the following merits:
- The journals no longer come as a huge package. This relieved my hands, which had been busy marking them back unread as the you-read-one-you-read-all nature of the mailbox. Now, I swipe vertically to switch within the journals, and there is no more pressure or overhead of managing a save-for-later or an only-read-half-of-them list (I won't read them anyway).
- As I mentioned above, the best time to read a journal is right after the second its title attracts your eyes. Therefore, managing a journal pool and wishing you could read the journals some other day is meaningless. As the RSS tools manage the statuses (read, bookmarks, etc.) by journals, you can enjoy a much lighter reading experience instead of pushing yourself by thinking, "I have to read all of them once I unseal the mail".
- RSS tools make the articles "purer". All distractions, complicated layouts, stylesheets, related links, and annoying commercials are omitted by loading and processing XML files. The RSS tools help you to concentrate on the journals themselves.
How I read now
Now, with RSS tools, I hardly feel pressure to read journals. I no longer need long periods to do readings. Instead, I utilise the fragmental time for much lighter readings. Hope I can overcome my dyslexia someday...