I’ve recently realized that my habits for interacting with World Wide Web changed over time. Here’s how I spend my time, consume the content and communicate in the internet.

In general#

  • RSS – oh boy, I’ve never left the RSS boat, even after Google Reader was shutdown years ago. Right now I use it to browse a very diverse (also random) set of feeds to broaden my perspectives and follow the topics I’m interested about – without the comments/likes hustle.

    The last part is crucial for me – RSS are about the content, not everything around it. That’s actually how I like to browse web.

  • Newsletters – when I was a very active developer back in a day, I felt that being on the edge with news about programming languages, new libraries, etc. was a must. After a while, I realized that receiving TOP-10 links from a given topic once a week is enough. I still believe that’s the case and that’s why I like reading newsletters:) One caveat – RSS feed is still better when executed nicely.
  • Mastodon – new player in the block, I covered it my another post. Currently, it serves as my tiny social network and inspiration for browsing other people’s blogs.
  • Random pages on the internet – I’m combining Mastodon toots with subscribing to people’s feeds. Most of the time, people are not that active on blogs, write 10 pages a year or something like that. But that’s exactly what I like – exploring this random stuff, finding great content (and collecting another ideas to explore). I still don’t want to leave “the bubble” but at the same time feel comfortable with content “on the edge”.

    This approach exposes me to a quite varied set of topics which I probably wouldn’t find otherwise.

  • Facebook Groups – there’s really good content in FB groups! I avoid things that are “general”, like city-based groups, etc., I focus on specialized groups of people who talk and exchange ideas about a narrow topic, e.g. woodworking, car detailing or cycling. I don’t like the interaction process, but you can get a lot by the extended context of comments in some discussions.
  • Messenger/Signal/WhatsApp/iMessage – depending on the group of people I’m interacting with, instant messaging app changes and I can’t really tell which one is my platform of choice. The biggest problem I have is that the most people are on the platforms I’d like to utilize the least 🙃

All these activities have enabled me to stay connected and up-to-date with the ever-growing world of the web. I enjoy the freedom of browsing, exploring and learning from the world wide web, and I am constantly experimenting and adapting to the best ways to do so. Even without realizing that I do experiment:)

Work#

  • Slack – most of my work happens there. Mentions, tasks, daily job. I don’t want to say it’s my main working tool - actually it is and my work happens through Slack. I do fun and serious stuff there, but there’s always too much going on.
  • E-mail – not used that much anymore, forwarding from time to time, intros, contacting with people outside of the company
  • LinkedIn – networking is important part of my role and LinkedIn gives me the best visibility and chance to understand what’s going on “professionally”

After writing this, I came to a conclusion that this is just a general outline of how do I interact with the Web, without concrete details. That’s totally OK – if you would like me to expand some of the channels a bit, let me know!