Introducing The Lexfeed (RSS)

Please behold The Lexfeed! It houses a stream of uncurated daily updated links to news articles, fiction, poems and whatever links that look like they have a passing interest to me that I want to read at some point in the future. The only real principle: these links reside in one place. I offer The Lexfeed for your use, pleasure and learning.

The Internet holds a lot of interesting and entertaining content. It has the problem of disorganization and housing at multiple sources. Links on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and wherever else we might frequent.

My gathering of links as browser bookmarks had gotten out of hand. Bookmarks syncing between all my devices helped.

It didn't do enough, though. I couldn't catch up with reading them all while I neglected the articles that my RSS feeder gathered. Offhand, it doesn't sound bad. Reading stuff is reading stuff. I find different types of articles from people I follow on social media (social justice, writing, science fiction & fantasy, politics, etc) than what I have my RSS feed grab (economics, finance, investing, pop culture, local news, world news, etc).

I would have loved to find way of adding my social media feeds to my RSS feed, but I can't find anyway to do it. Twitter allowed it at some point in the past but not anymore. Social media needs to make money, and it can't do so if people don't use their website or apps.

The Lexfeed provides an imperfect solution. I use the following process: bookmark articles that catch my interest, once per day I post as many of the links to The Lexfeed using the AddThis app on Google Chrome.

This process has a drawback: I can post around 50 links a day this way. Once I hit that point, Blogger starts hitting me with human tests. Understandable. I agree with the spirit. We don't want annoying spiders crawling the Internet or pointless news aggregators looking for hits. As an amateur researcher, I hate automated, redundant news aggregators clogging up search engines.

Sure, I'm looking for hits, but I do what I can to keep the Feed off search engines. I DO aggregate links, but I'm doing it for selfish, not directly profit-oriented purposes. I want to integrate links into my RSS feed that wouldn't otherwise appear there. I offer it to those "in the know" as a side effect while trying to avoid collateral cluttering of the Internet. Hopefully it provides benefit.

If you find The Lexfeed helpful, great! Please don't link to individual entries. Link to the actual articles, stories, whatever it is directly. If someone else wants to access such an unfocused feed and/or put it onto their RSS feed, give them the link to whole blog, not any individual entries.

What's funny: I haven't reached any of these links on my RSS feed yet. So much posting on social media! Someday this process should yield some ROI. I look forward to it.

Link of Interest:

• The Lexfeed