Like most of you, I am impatiently waiting for the "Follow" button on Steemit to be implemented.

You probably already know that @discombobulated has put together steemitx.com as a crude way to follow users.

The other night, I had an idea for a similar site myself. My idea was for the site to generate RSS feeds for a particular author. Users could then subscribe to the feeds they are interested in through their favorite RSS client.

I started thinking about how I was going code this site, what tools I should use, etc. An hour later I put "steem rss" into Google just to make sure that a site like that doesn't already exist. And lo and behold, it does already exist!

So here's the announcement from @xeroc, released two weeks ago: Streemian.com now offers RSS feeds for Steem

What the heck is an RSS feed?

RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, is a standardised format used to manage subscriptions to blog posts, podcasts, video feeds, or any other type of frequently updated web content.

Content provided in RSS format can be subscribed to in a RSS reader. There are hundreds of RSS readers available - web-based readers, desktop applications, mobile applications.

Most RSS readers can be configured to notify you about new posts. Another advantage of RSS is that because it's a standardised format, you can "aggregate" all your RSS subscriptions from tons of different sites into one big stream of news. Kind of like making your own digital newspaper tailored to your own interests. Very cool.

So how do I use it?

Check out the links from @xeroc's post. The link for an RSS feed that follows a particular author would be: http://www.streemian.com/rss/@ned

Enter that link into your favorite RSS reader. Personally I like TheOldReader for web based reading and Liferea on my Linux desktop.

You can add as many subscriptions / follow as many authors as you want.

So there you have it! A super effective way to keep track of all your favorite authors on Steem. Thanks to @xeroc for building this service.

If I may, I have a few suggestions to improve it further:

• Parse markdown into HTML so that all the formatting and images are visible within the RSS reader.
• Improve feed titles (something like "AUTHOR on Steem" instead of "Steem - recent/" for every feed)
• Add comments
• Add datetime of a post