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Here is how replacing RSS feeds with JS twitter influencers helped me to stay updated

· 3 min read
D Balaji
D Balaji
Lead Design Technologist

reading old updates

Staying up to date with relevant updates from the frontend community is an art rather than a science. I am a big fan of the Feedly app which is an awesome RSS feed reader. My blog updates can be subscribed to on Feedly for updates. Analyzing the data points, I am in favor of Twitter over subscribing to blogs for keeping you updated on the tools, libraries, processes, and APIs in the frontend.

What is a RSS feed?​

Let's say you liked my blog, you like to keep yourself notified about every new post. There are a few options before you like bookmarking the site and visiting every couple of days, checking my Twitter feed, etc but every mid-size blog has a killer feature called RSS feed XML file which gets updated when we post a blog post. Now clients are observing the RSS file and showing you the title and metadata of the blog post the author had recently written.

Why do you say no to the RSS feed?​

This is mostly due to the blogging ecosystem. The technical blogging is done mostly to share how-to or how they solved a problem like "10 things about typescript at Bloomberg engineering". The post goes about explaining how they evaluated and drove changes across the Organization.

By the time people blog about success stories and mass adoption, the niche phase is already over. There are a million people aware and a few thousand proficient at the tool/library.

staying updated means, taking the knowledge from the niche that's fast-growing and using the momentum for professional growth and org success.

The niche community updates are common on Twitter which helps me a lot.

How is twitter better than RSS feeds​

Twitter is about

  • smaller size of content, easily consumable, and makes sense
  • posted by actual folks instead of writers or tech journalists
  • generally, bleeding edge stuff gets discovered here

How to setup Twitter infra​

You have to do one thing right,

Follow the right people, unfollow the rest on Twitter. This keeps up the quality of your feed.

How do you find people to follow?​

Look around, every editor/reviewer of a technical book might have an active Twitter profile along with the author. Library authors like Dan (React team) have an active Twitter profile.

The synergy of the Twitter audiences like quality comments etc keeps up the game and helps us stay updated. Writing

What are the other avenues which are great but not right for you​

There are plenty

  • Reddit, it's like quora. It steals your time.

  • Hacker news

  • Github feed

  • Bookmark and visit blogs

  • Email newsletters

  • meetups and tech conferences