Two new options for following the blog have appeared on Kalais Bricks - via newsletter and RSS feed. 10 years too late? Probably not :) These are options for pro Internet users.

The Internet is coming full circle and old technologies are slowly coming back into favor.

It happens to me all the time. Blame algorithms that serve us content. They do whatever they want. My Facebook wall is full of posts from profiles that I have never subscribed to. And I almost never see those that I have subscribed to...

And here comes the RSS feeds. The old standard for following news from websites. To use them all you need is an RSS reader. Either in the form of an app or simply a website in your browser.

When we start following a few profiles and pages it will start to look exactly the same as any social media except that... only what we really subscribe to will be displayed and nothing will be hidden. The rules are simple, it all depends on you. If you follow something, you see it in the feed, if you don't follow it, it doesn't appear.

Private RSS feeds were something which corporations didn’t want because they cannot be controlled and there is no way for them to have power over what will be displayed to the users.

When I started this blog in 2015 I thought RSS was dead and I didn't even make a feed here. That was a mistake that I'm currently fixing :) Add it to your readers:
→ Kalais Bricks RSS Feed

As for the RSS readers, here are some of the most popular options. Each is free up to a certain number of sources tracked.
- Feedly (up to 100 channels for free)
- The Old Reader (up to 100 channels for free)
- Inoreader (up to 150 channels for free)
- NewsBlur (up to 64 channels for free)
- Opera (yes, that's the browser. RSS feeds can be linked to news feed in it. There are no limits to the number of feeds you can follow for free. Chrome (owned by Google) of course doesn't have such a built-in option. Coincidence? I don't think so ;) To find news, type opera://news/ in the address bar in Opera and start following the feeds by clicking "Add sources" on the left side of the page.)

But that's not all. There is another way to free yourself from algorithms that dictate what we should read.

Email subscription aka newsletter. You simply get a notification by email that a new post has appeared on a given page. There is not much more to write about here but Kalais Bricks has never had such a service and now it does :) Subscribe! :)

→ Sign up for the Kalais Bricks newsletter

P.S. And now for more advanced users some interesting tip - you can also follow our favorite MOC authors on Flickr via RSS. Some time ago it was the most popular and great platform for AFOLs. Many people still post their MOCs there. Unfortunately the algorithms are also crazy there and they rarely show us all the authors we follow on the main page.

But there is good news. You can add them to RSS reader. You will receive every photo they upload in the RSS feed. To do this you need to know the NSID number of the user and modify the link below:
https://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=HereTypeNSID&format=rss_200

For Kalais Bricks, the NSID is 133300794%40N07, so the link to RSS will be like this:
https://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=133300794%40N07&format=rss_200

Unfortunately Flickr does not provide users' NSIDs anywhere, but you can use this site:
webfx.com/tools/idgettr/

Paste a link to any photo of the person you want to follow there and this site will display the NSID of that user.

Congratulations! You've reached the end of the story about old technologies that are becoming popular again. Have fun! If you have any questions please comment below and I'll try to answer.