everything new is old again

I like having one place to go to read all of the new posts for the blogs I follow along with daily updates from pages such as NPR Arts & Life. This was made easy a number of years ago with the advent of RSS, Really Simple Syndication. All you needed was a web site or app that supported the protocol. For a long time a lot of us used Google Reader, which was well suited for the task. But Google can be like a child with a short attention span who gets bored easily, and it dropped Google Reader a while back, sending lots of people scrambling. I have since been using a service called NewsBlur, which I can access from my web browser or by using their iOS app on my iPhone and iPad. It works well.

The problem is that RSS support has become spotty. Bosco Peters, an Anglican priest in New Zealand, has a wonderful blog called Liturgy. When Bosco redid his web site the RSS feed was lost, and his attempts to fix it were unsuccessful. My friend Tahoe Mom resurrected her blog at a new site and it has no RSS feed. Frustrating.

I suppose the predominance of social media has rendered RSS nearly obsolete. That’s unfortunate, because in these days and times I try to stay away from social media except for Instagram, and I especially work at keeping off Facebook except for my Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd communication tasks.

To invert the words of that catchy Peter Allen song: Everything new is old again.