Follow HNTS In Your RSS Reader

You Can Keep Up With HNTS In Your RSS Reader

Ahoy there! You can now read all of my blog posts (or all posts on the site) in your favorite RSS reader.

I’ve set up HowNotToSail.com to be as privacy-respecting as possible…so it’s already free of the digital cavity search you get from most websites these days. But if you already use an RSS reader to surf the latest news and whatnot (and perhaps you should—not so much for this site, but for other news sites and blogs), I’ve got you covered!

So going forward, I’m going to do my best to make sure every post reads well in the RSS feed as well as via your browser.

Why an RSS Reader?

If the term “RSS reader” is alien to you, there’s an excellent blog post by Cory Doctorow on why they’re so darned cool. (Note: Most of Mr. Doctorow’s posts touch on politics, and his may not agree with yours. But if you care about privacy–or whether complete strangers are abusing you online–This is a good read. Scroll down to the RSS part if you get itchy.)

If you just want the bullet points, though, some benefits of using an RSS reader are:

• You’re not using a web browser, so goodbye to tracking your every move online.
• Just get the content you want, without all the ads and junk on the page.
• Cut down on the mindless surfing; less distraction.
• RSS is not just for blogs! You can subscribe to podcast and YouTube feeds, newsletters, and even your FedEx and UPS deliveries. (So Doctorow says, anyway. I haven’t confirmed that one.)

There are only two industries that call their customers “users””: illegal drugs and software. –Edward Tufts

How To Read HNTS Posts Using RSS

To subscribe, for example, to How Not To Sail blog posts only, use this link. (In most cases, you can right-click to copy the feed URL and paste it into your RSS reader. And if you just hover over the link with your cursor, you can see what it is before copy/pasting…a habit I’ve gotten used to.)

You can also subscribe to these feeds:

• Main Feed (all posts)
• News Only

Wanna get even geekier?

• HNTS Mastodon Feed
• Podcast Feed (Kinda redundant if you already use a podcast app, but…)
• HNTS Comments Feed

Looking for an RSS reader?

Here are a couple of RSS Readers I’ve been happy with. They are all free, and I believe, open source.

• NetNewsWire (I use this on the Mac.)
• NewsFlash (For Linux users.)
• Newsboat (A SUPER-geeky, command line-based reader. My current fave.)
• (Windows user? Can’t help ya, Cap’n…but save yourself!)

What’s your favorite RSS Reader? Let me know in the comments below.

Caveats

I will say that, unfortunately, a lot of sites only provide a short teaser or description of each post in their RSS feed…in which case, you have to open the web page to view the whole post or article. But in those cases:

• Some RSS readers provide their own “clean” browser window; or
• You can configure the RSS reader to view the page in a browser like Brave or “hardened” Firefox; or
• You can choose another site or ask the webmaster to provide a complete feed!

Of course, the whole text of each post appears in the How Not To Sail RSS feed, so we’re good to go! You can even listen to the podcast episodes and view show notes in your RSS reader. (Either in the main feed, or the podcast feed.)

Are you using an RSS reader to keep up with How Not To Sail? Let me know!

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