As you may have already read, Google Reader dies tonight.

First, a note on RSS:

If you consider yourself creative, inspiration should in some way be important to you. Thanks to the magic of the web, inspiration is published virtually non-stop throughout the world. One of the ways this inspiration can be captured is through RSS. RSS is the way that blogs, news sites, social media profiles and many other websites are syndicated. You can collect these feeds via an RSS reader, where they can be read, organized and shared. Many people have decreed the death of RSS – consumers are largely shifting to social media “curators” for their content. I believe true inspiration junkies need RSS, though.

Google Reader was arguably (if not handily) the top RSS reader out there. If people weren’t using Google Reader directly, they were likely using the Google Reader API. GReader was the center of the RSS universe.

And now it’s dying.

If you use Google Reader, there are plenty of posts telling you what you need to do.

I want to talk to those who aren’t yet using RSS: Check out my new favorite RSS reader, Feedly. It’s robust and constantly being improved upon.

Go set up an account and create at least three categories. Then, as you add feeds (there’s a little “add content” button in the top left), put them in a category. I think this is a crucial step and something I didn’t do when I started using Google Reader. Now I’ve got more than 1,000 feeds and most of them aren’t organized (there’s a rainy day project).

And the very first feed you should add?

This one: