thaddeushunt.com

Is RSS dead? Many folks “in the know” claim that it is and yet, it’s still hanging around, for better or worse. Me? I use it sparingly. It’s still second to none when you want to follow a site and get links to every piece of content they produce.

Until recently, I looked at RSS as mostly one way communication. You either produce the content and it gets syndicated. Or  you receive/consume the content and do with it what you will. That’s how RSS works. We all need to make our peace with it. Or do we?

What if you could create a dynamic RSS feed where you had complete and specific control over what showed up in it? What if you could share hand-picked content from anywhere on the web simply by tagging a link? That’d be pretty cool right!?

The Initial Problem

I had a good friend with similar interests and hobbies as me. As friends do, I often sent him links to stuff I thought he’d like in emails, texts, chat clients, you name it. As you can imagine, over time these links were scattered everywhere. Eventually it got to the point where if I asked if he got a chance to watch that trailer I sent him, he’d say “No, could you send it again?” and even I would have problems remembering how I sent it to him originally.

In short, it was a mess.

So I started looking in to something that could function as a master list of everything I sent him moving forward. No texts, no emails. He’d just have to remember that I created this list and check in on it whenever he thought about it. Traditional RSS is sort of what I was going for, but I didn’t want to spin up a site somewhere just for posting links for my friend. That felt like using a sledgehammer on a thumbtack.

What would’ve been perfect is if I found something on the web worth sharing, I could send it to a service, tag it specifically for my friend, and have that link added to his curated list for when he had the time to look at it later. It’d work two-fold. On the one hand, it’d always be added to, and on other, it’d be a library of cool stuff to reference down the road that would exist for as long as the service did.

Making RSS more surgical

It seemed like a tall order, but I found precisely what I was looking for with Pinboard. Boiled down, Pinboard is a bookmarking service/online repository with read later options (similar to Instapaper) and a deep, yet simple tagging system that helps keep things organized.

Quick aside up front. Pinboard is a paid service that costs $11 USD a year. If you can swing it though, you get a lot for your money and you support an indy developer that is taking online bookmark repositories to the next level.

Ok, back on task. I had been using Pinboard for over a year when I noticed one day that it dynamically creates an RSS feed for each individual tag you create [footnote]It’s not like I hadn’t noticed Pinboard supported RSS before. I just originally thought its capabilities were limited to a master list of any links you had set as publicly viewable.[/footnote]. So, I created a tag for my friend, sent him the RSS link, and that was that! He put the feed URL into his feed reader of choice and immediately started getting the links I was tagging in Pinboard for him!

Finding the tag-specific RSS link isn’t hard but, due to Pinboard’s intentionally spartan layout/design, it may not be obvious. If you haven’t already, create a tag then click the new tag in the tag-cloud to the right. This will bring you to a page displaying a list of links under this tag. Now look for the small orange “RSS” link in the upper right, it will be next to the search field. Right click it, choose copy, then paste it into whatever way you are sharing the RSS feed.

Moving forward.

To keep those links lining up for my friend, I use the bookmarklet Pinboard has created in Safari (Mac user here) and a universal iOS app called Pinner, that’s also on Android as well. Whether I’m in front of my computer, or on the go [footnote]Pinner’s got a particularly wonderful extension in the iOS share sheet by the way.[/footnote], both allow me to save and tag links quickly with very little effort.

That’s it! I know there are probably other services that serve up RSS in a similar fashion, but I hadn’t found one that handles it quite as well as Pinboard. Since setting up this custom RSS feed for my friend, I’ve also started using it for freelance client work. It’s an easy sell and it seems like magic to them when you show it in action.

So if you are a Pinboard user, you should definitely check out their RSS feed integration if you haven’t already. If you are looking for a better way to serve up your own custom RSS feed, give Pinboard a try! It’ll definitely have you looking at RSS in a completely different way!