{"id":2030,"date":"2016-06-01T09:47:24","date_gmt":"2016-06-01T15:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jamesgralian.com\/365\/?p=2030"},"modified":"2016-10-07T19:18:33","modified_gmt":"2016-10-08T01:18:33","slug":"06-01-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jamesgralian.com\/365\/2016\/06\/06-01-16\/","title":{"rendered":"06-01-16"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSC04588-Edit_2k\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Day\u00a0153 \/ 517 –<\/p>\n

I find myself less and less involved in social media these days. \u00a0I got burned out on it last year, and I’ve cut way back on my use. \u00a0Frankly, I’m happy I did. \u00a0I was spending way too much time and energy involved with it.<\/p>\n

Social media is getting noisier<\/a> and angrier<\/a>, with fake accounts, spam accounts, bots, and the worst of all, the companies themselves. \u00a0Facebook creates ways to keep the things the people you follow from reaching you, Instagram might start doing the same thing (curated feeds), and Twitter finds new and clever ways to interrupt your feed with things you don’t care about.<\/p>\n

In the Good Olde Days, we had Google Reader and RSS. \u00a0You subscribed to a blog (you see, a blog is \/ was a site where… never mind) in Google Reader, and every time it updated, it was in your feed, waiting for you to read it when you wanted. \u00a0It was beautiful.<\/p>\n

But wait, how is that different from a social media feed? \u00a0Well, when my site updates, it doesn’t have to compete for your attention with a troll, or a food post, or a retweet of something you don’t care about, or the picture of someone’s beard whom you have never met and never will, or smh, or tbh, or tbt, or another ICYMI when you didn’t miss it in the first place and would never “miss” it in the first place, or having to click through to see what someone else said that you don’t care about, or clickbait, or or or….<\/p>\n

In other words, Google Reader and RSS gave you what you wanted, when you were ready for it, without all the other crap. \u00a0And then they went away. \u00a0Google shut down Reader, and the world of social media took over. \u00a0And it’s sucked ever since.<\/p>\n

But RSS is still alive and well. \u00a0A few companies came to the rescue. \u00a0I use Feedly<\/a> for my RSS feeds, and use Digg Reader<\/a> as a backup. \u00a0They both have mobile apps (I use Newsify<\/a> on my iOS devices), and are fairly easy to use and unobtrusive. With Feedly, just put the URL of the site you want to follow into the Personalize section and you are good to go.<\/p>\n

But here is the ninja thing I do on my desktop browser. \u00a0I have a pinned tab for my Feedly feed, so it is always available as the first tab, ready to go (I also have the local weather on Wunderground<\/a> and the NHL scoreboard<\/a> pinned, but that’s just me). \u00a0It takes more effort to go to Facebook or Twitter than it does to look at my Feedly tab and see content that I want to see, rather than what the other sites think I want to see.<\/p>\n

So I encourage you to set up your own RSS reading site. \u00a0It is the first place I go online, because it puts the things I want and find interesting in front of me. \u00a0And it does it on my schedule.<\/p>\n

Special thanks to Seth Godin. \u00a0His post today inspired this. \u00a0He says it better than I do, so please go read him<\/a>. \u00a0I do, every day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Day\u00a0153 \/ 517 – I find myself less and less involved in social media these days. \u00a0I got burned out on it last year, and I’ve cut way back on my use. \u00a0Frankly, I’m happy I did. \u00a0I was spending way too much time and energy involved with it. Social media is getting noisier and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[201,29,207,196,94,199,200],"class_list":["post-2030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-118","tag-barn","tag-bloomington","tag-bw","tag-dark-skies","tag-il","tag-in-the-fields","tag-sky","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesgralian.com\/365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesgralian.com\/365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesgralian.com\/365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesgralian.com\/365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesgralian.com\/365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesgralian.com\/365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2030\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesgralian.com\/365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesgralian.com\/365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jamesgralian.com\/365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}