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<Page
  title="How to subscribe to joeac's blog"
  description="How to subscribe to joeac's blog"
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  <section>
    <h1>How to subscribe to my blog</h1>

    <p>
      The short version: use my <a href="/blog/rss.xml">RSS file</a> or my
      <a href="gemini://joeac.net/logs/longlog.gmi">gemlog</a>.
    </p>

    <p>
      If neither of those things means anything to you, no worries. You could
      just look at my website every once in a while, but that gets old. A better
      way is to use my RSS file. Here's how.
    </p>

    <p>
      An RSS file, if you don't know, is a file containing a list of posts in a
      format that's so stupid even computers can understand it. Mine is at
      <a href="https://joeac.net/blog/rss.xml">https://joeac.net/blog/rss.xml</a>.
      Since computers can understand it, you can get software to read it
      automatically and tell you when I've made a new blog post. That's much less
      hassle than having to check manually yourself!
    </p>

    <p>
      I'm not the only person serving RSS files, of course. You might not have
      heard of them, but they're actually all over the Web. In the early days of
      the Web, everyone was using them, so they've ended up built in to a whole
      load of foundational Web technology, and hence ubiquitous, even if most
      Web users have forgotten they exist. Once you've subscribed to my blog,
      you can subscribe to basically any blog, podcast, or YouTube channel, and
      a lot of other Websites for news, organisations, whatever. Point a
      well-designed RSS aggregator or RSS reader at most Websites, and it'll
      automatically find an associated RSS feed.
    </p>

    <p>
      If you're not persuaded, try reading
      <a href="https://doctorow.medium.com/you-should-be-using-an-rss-reader-76aed31151f9">
        Cory Doctorow explaining why RSS is ridiculously good
      </a>. He's terrifyingly persuasive. Also, read his novels!
    </p>

    <p>
      If you just want to give it a go quickly, probably the quickest way is to
      use someone else's RSS aggregator that they'll let you use as a service.
      <a href="https://feedly.com/news-reader">Feedly</a> and
      <a href="https://www.inoreader.com">Inoreader</a> have free tiers.
    </p>

    <p>
      If you want to have a little more control, you can self-host an RSS
      reader, like <a href="https://tt-rss.org">Tiny Tiny RSS</a>,
      <a href="https://miniflux.app">Miniflux</a>, or
      <a href="https://freshrss.org">FreshRSS</a>. But why would you do that?
      Self-hosting is complicated! Why not just use a normal, local app? Here are
      some options for that you might want to investigate. All these are active
      free and open-source software projects at the time of writing.
    </p>

    <ul>
      <li><a href="https://hyliu.me/fluent-reader">Fluent Reader</a> (Linux, Windows, Mac, also mobile I think?)</li>
      <li><a href="https://www.rssowl.org">RSSOwl</a> (Linux, Windows, Mac)</li>
      <li><a href="https://capyreader.com">Capy Reader</a> (Android)</li>
      <li><a href="https://apps.kde.org/en-gb/akregator">Akregator</a> (Linux, Windows (unstable))</li>
      <li><a href="https://gfeeds.gabmus.org">GFeeds</a> (Linux)</li>
      <li><a href="https://lzone.de/liferea">Liferea</a> (Linux)</li>
    </ul>

    <p>
      For the terminally geeky, there is also
      <a href="https://newsboat.org">Newsboat</a>. I used it for ages, it works
      fabulously, but it's all in the terminal, so you have to be OK with that.
    </p>

    <p>
      You can also just enter 'RSS feed reader' into your favourite search
      engine, software distribution, or app store and see what comes up. Try
      adding 'FOSS' into the query to prioritise free, open-source software.
    </p>
  </section>
</Page>
