Blogs are Back! (where did they go?) RSS Makes the Web Bearable (read in my dead reader!)

Blogs are Back?! Folks are dusting off their dormant blogs! It’s a new thing! A Revival! Strap yourself in, my three readers, this post is going to be a douzy.

Back to blogging, Huh? Who left? Not to brag, but why not, this blog has gone on steadily– HEY WAIT A MINUTE I GOT DATA (yearly database queries).

The CogDogBlog Pulse Index – posts per year

Well, it has fallen off, but no need to be “back” (and WTF was I doing in 2005 besides writing 527 posts?)

Back to Blogs as A Novel Type of Feed Reader

Just to rarely precede Stephen Downes who posted on February 25, back on January 5 of this year, I came across (and I forgot where I saw it mentioned) an interesting twist on Feed Readers called Blogs Are Back Now I have used an RSS reader since at least 2003 according to the blog-o-meter, I am pretty sure I started out with the web. based Bloglines that came out that same year.

The interesting twist with Blogs Are Back (from its web description) is that it runs totally in your browser (thank you local storage), so no accounts are needed and if you are a privacy hawk, you will appreciate it’s design. I honestly was drawn by its name.

I of course scanned it quickly and then gave it my “cooltech” treatment, bookmarking in Pinboard and then letting one of my integration gizmos post it to Mastodon (note that this is enabled by monitoring the RSS feed for my Poinboard tag).

Now the wild thing was that same day I got an email from its creator, Travis:

I just saw your Mastodon post mentioning Blogs Are Back, and I wanted
to personally reach out and thank you — it really means a lot to have
any sort of mention, as I’m finally getting the project to the point
where I’m sorta soft launching it.

If you ever have any issues with it or any feedback, please let me know.

That’s rather impressive, how often does a developer reach out personally like that? Of course I had some questions, I had tried to use it’s feature to import OPML and it failed. Email to Travis. Email right back, he had needed to work on that part. There was about 5 back and forths, Travis kept apologizing for long emails, and me saying, don’t be ridiculous, how often does one get to talk to a developer?

So it does work as any Feed Reader does, the performance seems best on blogs that are “listed” on the site in the Directory, like this post from Austin Kleon:

Browsing Austin Kleon’s blog in Blogs Are Back

Eventually I did import to Blogs Are Back all my subscriptions I have now in Inoreader… well most of them seem to get imported. Still, it took a while for posts to start coming in, and I don’t see them all, but here is D’Arcy Norman’s blog who I always have to credit as likely one of the earliest blogs to get me thinking about RSS. You can see that for some reason the content on the view pane is not displaying correctly.

D’Arcy Norman’s blog viewed in Blogs Are Back

Travis was kind enough to add CogDogBlog to the Community blogs, look at me there. You get much more functionality (I think) when you install the Blogs are Back browser extension. A nice one is you can have a little popup button that shows up on any site that has a detectable RSS feed, enabling a more easy way to subscribe to feeds.

That was always a hiccup for the eary feed days, you had to copy those obscure URLs from a source to your feed reader, often but not always published under an orange icon. Things are muh easier now, like in Inoreader, I can just add a feed by pasting in a site’s URL and it auto checks what feeds are available.

It also provides me a little cut and paste follow button you can dig for way down in my blog footer, where few eyes likely tread. Ideally it provides another way to one click subscribe, and you can see how massive an audience this blog maintains.

A Blogs Are Back button in thre CogDogBlog footer

I realize now that I was going about using Blogs Are Back wrong, I have no need to replicate a reader experience that works more than perfectly for me in Inoreader. I should really have aimed it more at maybe a particular niche use, or topic I am not following in Inoreader.I am not sure, I expect something will emerge in the future when I can see a need for Blogs Are Back.

It’s an impressive effort by Travis and I more than support it. I can see it maybe be ideal for someone to try who has never used a Feed Reader as a first run. It’s Directory offers some good starter feeds, though I think its a bit narrowly focused on tech blogs. And as most things tech, I can count on that I am missing some key functionalities in it.

The privacy angle is compelling, but when I thought about it, if you are that worried, you should be using a desktop Feed Reader, right?

Again, Again, Again RSS

Few make the case for RSS better than Cory Doctorow which he does again with The web is bearable with RSS and in early writings he described how versatile it truly is to let you read the content of many sites free of the enpoopified effects of ads, pop ups, subscription nags- its more than blogs, you can read all those Blogs Morphed Into Email News Letters not cluttering your email, but mixed in with other sources.

I frankly think it goes way beyond those benefits, for longer than the age of my old jeans it’s the most sane way to scan the newest content from sites you choose, not from cruft thrust at you by an algorithm. I will repeat regularly until the day I am worm food that an RSS Feed Reader is:

The Indispensable Digital Research Tool I can Say, Without Lying, Saves Time

I remain profoundly confused as to why so many have not figured this out. I saw replies to Doctorow’s post in Mastodon saying things like “I have been 20 years in the tech field and this is the first time I have heard of this.”

I have not been without regular checks of my feeds since 2003.

I do agree very much with Dave Winer’s response to the Bearability of RSS post:

A line that just makes my groan and puke is “RSS was killed when Google took away Google Reader”. That is just falseness. Or laziness. RSS did not die, most people just let it languish in their lust for the streams. The end was not an end at all.

Reader’s End is Near

I downloaded a 40k file for all my subscriptions, and quickly slid them to Feedly, Flipboard, but then I really liked the functionality of Digg Reader. When that died I took my feeds to Feedly, and then eventually to where I am now, with Inoreader.

And that’s the thing, unlike make web services, when a Feed Reader goes belly up, you do not lose any data or content. As long as you export your feeds, you just move them elsewhere and carry on (maybe you lose knowing what articles have been read, but that slips downstream).

A key feature that I am not too sure even the few folks that bother with RSS readers use is grouping feeds into folders for a particular topic. Rather than scanning the stream of everything, I am able to see in my Inoreader, the latest posts from blogs I want to read the most (I call this folder “Top Shelf”) but I have other folders for “Photography”, “WordPress”, and “Weird Stuff”. And a power move with Inoreader is that I can mix feeds into a folder, and then I get an RSS feed for that folder to use elsewhere. I use that for the OEGlobal Voices Podcast site where I offer access to the latest episodes from a folder of Open Education podcasts and another use for Open Education Week to syndicate together a series distributed across three blogs.

If you ever are exposed to one of those proclamations that “RSS is Dead” the best response is to ask the prognosticating Thought bLeader if they listen to podcasts, and if they know hoe their devices know there are new episodes.

Honestly, not using RSS is…. dumb.

Pssss… have You Heard About RSS?

I would be the house that I was drawn into the RSS cult via my time worn strategy of DWDD (Do What D’Arcy Does) by picking up likely on his first ucalgarly blog, D’arcy Norman talking about RSS. He introduced me to NetNewsWire, the desktop RSS Reader app (free and open source) that is still in active development by its creator Brent Simmons who is also a life long blogger.

Recently I stumbled across a screenshot of my NetNewsWire feeds in maybe 2003, and yes, it has open a post from D’Arcy’s original blog which thankfully is Waybacked (note how rich the comment conversations were)

Where have all the Bloggers gone? Look at the what I was reading via RSS in 2003 via NetNewsWire. I bet OLDaily is the only one still in business.

Earlier in 2003 I was deeply influenced by Stephen Downes’s RSS for Educators paper at the time I was building a custom coded….. um… repository for the Maricopa Community Colleges called the Maricopa Learning eXchange. Following Stephen’s ideas, with the MLX built with PHP and mySQL I was able to have it generate RSS feeds for all kinds of layers in this collection, not only for newest items over all, but feeds for activity associated with one college, but I think for subjects, maybe even authors.

That got me one of the biggest boosts ever by “getting Downsed”.

My comments on D’Arcy’s post above too indicate how at the time I even set up Trackback support in thre MLX so it could pick up references for an item if its links was mentioned in an external blog. We were doing crazy crazy wild fun stuff then. It was en electric time of discovery, a void I see now with all the vibe-code slinging I see happening.

All of this was intertwined when D’Arcy, me, and Brian Lamb conspired (and all done before ever meeting in person) on what we called “The Fuss” or “What’s the Fuss About RSS?” spawned as a “blog/wiki/paper” we creatred for an EDUCAUSE online presentation (what did we even use then, was it Elluminate) for an EDUCAUSE working group with the affectionate acronym name of LOVCOP (Learning Object Virtual Community of Practice). The whole thing was housed on a UseMod Wiki running from a server in Brian’s office in Vancouver running the CAREO server D’Arcy built. Oh the memories just seeing the Fuss again. Can I claim some foresight in that I made a static archive of the wiki in June 2003?

I had this whacky scenario/demo running as real (MoveableType) blogs for a fictitious Geology faculty named Lora (played in presentations by Brian’s UBC colleague Michelle Lamberson) and another one by a Biology facuty “Boris” (played in prentations by my Maricopa colleague John Arle) where they blogs were connected by RSS and trackbacks to the Maricopa Learning eXchange).

Amongst my pile of posts in 2003 is a post Fuss presentation recap where (via a trackback ping from a now dead blog), George Siemens noted:

Explaining RSS is like explaining sex. You just don’t get it until you do it.

Brian, D’Arcy and I took the Fuss show later that year to the MERLOT 2003 conference in Vancouver (where we met on the same space for the first time) and also September I think for an NMC Online conference.

I aimed to reach beyond my circle of bloggers and RSS nerds. For our newsletter we published at the time as the Maricopa Center for Learning Instruction Forum I published an article “Pssss… Have You Heard About RSS?“

Fall 2003 article from the mcli Foroum from my web archives I maintain on my domain

Beyond the explaining of nuts and bolts, it shows prototypes of working examples how an RSS feed for new content from what was then About.com about a topic like “Transcendentalism” could be embedded as a live feed in s Blackboard course using an RSS to Javascript tool.

2003 was a helluva a year for me with bending and wrangling RSS feeds.

And now in 2026, we are still making a case for it? And Blogging? While the world scrolls on and focuses on boosting and clicking Like buttons in LinkedIn?

Sigh.

If you cannot appreciate its power now, I just shrug. I will keep on scanning my feeds every day.

Oh well that’s more than anyone likely wants to read on dead tech RSS. I have better things to do, like checking my Feed Reader.

Featured Image: Cat Yawn flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license that is the famous house cat Bubba from Villa Ganz in Guadalajara remixed with screenshots from Blogs are Back and Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic post The web is bearable with RSS.