If you want a convenient way to get and read all new things I post on this site, you can use an RSS reader. The URL of this site’s RSS feed is:
https://weblog.tamseel.pk/rss
These days almost all sites use email newsletter as a means of staying in touch with users. But RSS works on an inverse philosophy. The site shouldn’t keep user in touch. Rather, the user should stay in touch with the site.
Email Newsletters are a push mechanism where you give every site your email address and they send in updates any time they want in your inbox. This is the push mechanism.
RSS is a pull mechanism. Here, I give you my RSS feed url. And you can add this feed to an RSS reading app and your app will fetch new items from the feed periodically, that you can read any time from that app.
The RSS approach was more popular in old times. But the shift happened as the competition for users’ limited attention started becoming fierce. In the pull mechanism, it is up to user whether to open their RSS app or not, and whether they want to get on notifications or not, and all sorts of options like that. The intention lies upon the reader.
With emails, the email lands in your inbox whether at that time your intention to read is or isn’t. For me, often times, I get a newsletter, I don’t want to read it right away, so I swipe the notification away, and I forget, and since more stuff keep coming in, the old newsletters are pushed downwards and remain unread in the inbox. So, I thought of making a new email address just for newsletter, but boy, the number of email addresses I have is already too high. I should stop workarounds and look for proper solution and the proper solution is very old and simple, i.e. RSS. That gives me full control over what I receive, how frequently I receive it, and how I am notified of it. Of course, you can unsubscribe to email newsletters as well, and tinker with your email settings, but come on, go look at your inbox. I can’t stand having that kind of inbox. At the moment, I don’t have enough actual data to tell how the experience of shifting to RSS has been, but I will write about once I have.
Now, I know, some people might not have any problem with instant updates at any time, well they can set up their RSS reader app, to check for updates more frequently and set up notifications for it.
If you want to read a better version of this posts, and a list of some rss reading apps (I haven’t tried them yet), read this: