A Case for Really Simple RSS Readers

I’m old. When RSS was hitting the streets we subscribed from desktop clients and didn’t have multiple computers to keep in sync (I don’t care if my read/unread count is in sync, but that’s another matter.)

It’s nice to see RSS readers popping up, Google Reader disappearing was good for the ecosystem, it revived a stagnant market.

One thing that’s missing from all the clients I’ve tried is a very simple mechanism to sync my OPML subscription file to my Dropbox account. I don’t use a centralized service to fetch the distributed network of RSS feeds I follow. Since I don’t care about read/unread counts it makes sense for me to sync locally. The only thing I’d like to keep in sync are my subscriptions, my OPML file.

I currently use Reeder across Mac, iPad, and iPhone, but as far as I’m aware it doesn’t support saving my subscriptions to a cloud based solution. If all RSS readers supported existing storage services, Dropbox seems the most logical choice, then we could keep our subscriptions in sync without the need of another service.