About Two Waves and a Dot
Hi,
Human here! I just wanted to give you some background on this blog, why it exists, and how everything came together. Just be aware that you are reading this weeks after I originally wrote it, in July 2026. I’m a bit of a serial project abandoner. More on that later, but I promised myself I would not publish a new blog before I am 100% sure that I have gathered enough content to make it a worthwhile effort. Thankfully, these days, AI makes it easier for me to get out of the slump that I fall into every time a project goes from being fun to being serious work. As you are reading this, it looks like I made it.
So the story of me and RSS.. I must have started using RSS in the very early 2000s. No idea what I was using then to consume it, probably Mozilla Thunderbird, but this doesn’t really matter to this story. So I was consuming lots of feeds at that time, and I also had a slightly successful gadget review blog on Blogger, which I (you guessed it) abandoned a long, long time ago. Just like I had a full Slashdot-like site for tech interviews ready, with RSS and Atom feed generation, but abandoned it when it came to actually filling it with content and talking to humans (bleh!). Anyways, I had already been exposed to RSS a lot, both as a consumer and producer.
When, in 2005, Google Reader came out, it was a revelation. Back then, existing RSS readers were better than visiting websites one by one, but they weren’t really a joy to use. Google Reader was. So these were the happy days, when RSS was easy and was slowly entering the mainstream. For personal reasons, like meeting my future wife, it was also the time when I stopped working on any new content projects, but I was an avid user of Google Reader. Generally, even today, I am spending a significant part of my waking hours reading things on the internet, and an RSS reader makes it so much easier.
And then, in 2013, it all ended: Google Reader was shut down. My first reaction was to create a new reader on my own. Only this was the time when my wife and I got our first kids, and I was smart enough to know that creating a cloud-based RSS reader was an enormous task that I would never be able to complete. So I moved to Feedly quickly, since they made the migration easy. And Feedly works fine. I never loved it like I loved Google Reader. But, on the other hand, it worked and was better than visiting websites one by one. So I kept using it for quite a while. Till 2026, actually. Always thinking of what I would like to improve, but also knowing that I had no realistic chance to build this on the side, and whatever I started would just end up as another corpse on my list of abandoned projects.
Last year, near the end of 2025, I was still working on a different project, and realized that Claude Code is now so advanced that I had a realistic chance of creating the RSS reader that I really wanted in 3-4 months. So I did what I always do, abandoned paused my existing project, and started to work on a new one. And because all (really all!) good .com domain names that contain words like “read” or “feed” are long gone, I settled on the last remaining one: downread.com.
I am now near the end of month number 8, so the 4 months didn’t quite hold. In my defense, it was already very usable after 4 months. Just not ready to release. There are so many usable RSS readers already out there that I decided that I need to create one that really feels superior - people usually don’t give products a second chance.
But coming back to this blog: during the last 8 months, I have read countless blogs, looked at countless other RSS readers, and I am keeping up with what is happening with RSS… it currently even feels like there is some momentum. Or maybe I just feel like this because I am spending so much time actively looking out for anything anyone ever says about RSS. Anyway, I thought I should use this to create a central source of information for the RSS community, because there isn’t one yet. And also, as a side-effect, to have a channel to promote my RSS reader just a little bit. I am really not going to talk about it here unless I have a big announcement. It will have its own blog. So this will be a neutral blog, about RSS, Atom, JSON feeds… and whatever info I come across on my journey.
Tim