The www viewer for the rss’d of us
RSS Deck is a browser-first feed reader and (coming soon!) writer — a browsing platform.
Rather than combining information sources into a single homogonous list, they appear as cards, each displaying a list of items and functioning as a column. Cards are as visually distinct as possible, almost like mini-sites.
It’s a more cognitively ergonomic and visually pleasant way to access what’s new on the web, both for consumption and (again, coming soon!) production of information. It enables people to stay powerfully abreast and connected without suffering some of the drawbacks of more social media. It is somewhat social media.
Feeds enter RSS Deck via RSS/Atom/JSONFeed formats, scraped web pages, and APIs. Each is branded and configured by the user who added it to the system — its curator — for instant recognition and to best display its content.
Images from the James Webb Space Telescope, for example, should be displayed differently than headlines and blurbs from The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed section. These curated designs can then be adapted by individual users for their own use.
Cards appear side-by-side chronologically, alphabetically or sorted manually within smart sets. Sets are smart in that they are comprised of cards based both on include/exclude lists and on tags. (And tags are in turn somewhat smart in that they are categorized into tag types such as countries and industries and whatnot).
Sets are stacked onscreen to form Racks, each an overview of an entire topic. So, with multiple sets containing multiple feeds, each with a dozen or more items, a rack may be displaying hundreds of items onscreen at a time — this is powerful! Helping browse and navigate this agglomoration is the Zoomed Out view.
Racks are also tagged, so that Search results contain not only relevant feeds but entire racks (coming soon). It’s quick and easy to then build an extensive list of organized, branded feeds. And since feeds get added to sets and sets get added to racks automatically via tagging, each user continues to benefit from the entire userbase’s ongoing curation.
When browsing the racks, saving items to My Reading List combines them for viewing later — and syncs them to other software such as Readwise Reader.
Every visit to a link gets saved to My History where you can (coming soon) write about the item in My Blog, which is syndicated as both RSS and JSONFeed files and gets a page at RSS Deck .
Users can assume various roles (similar to Apple’s Focus modes) and see views pertinent only to that role (coming soon).
For the enterprise, this means that staffers can be given dashboards tailored to their jobs that integrate up-to-the-minute information across the enterprise’s landscape, from team updates to the state of the market.
RSS Deck was launched in private beta at https://rssdeck.com in 2022 by Adam S Khan AKA ~CmdrDecker, a web designer/developer with an editorial background.
Please do contact Adam at adam.khan@rssdeck.com with your thoughts regarding RSS Deck !
This document is a work in progress begun December 20th, 2022, Brighton, UK and last updated September 19th, 2023
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