RSS: You should use it.

As a long-time user of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to consume media, I thought I’d write a short post about it. The first specification was released on 15 March 1999, so it did celebrate its 25th birthday yesterday after all. Subscribing to RSS feeds allows you to receive updates on new posts to a website, it’s used by news aggregators to get you articles from different sources, and most famously used to deliver the latest podcast episodes to your app of choice. ¹

When a site publishes a new item, say a blog post, it creates a new item in its published RSS feed. If you’ve subscribed to this feed, your reader or aggregator will query the feed periodically for updates and display any new items to you. RSS uses a stable and standardised format that allows readers to parse through the item metadata (published date, language, title, etc.) and the actual content such as text, images, and videos.

About Feeds concisely explains what RSS is, how to use it and some reader apps to get started. All the details I’ll be covering in this post but if you can’t stand my verbose ramblings you can skip this and check that page out instead.

RSS apps

There are various RSS and aggregator apps out there to use, I use Miniflux to both subscribe to and read posts on my feed, it’s a self-hosted application that provides a web interface that I can use on any device. Some may choose to use Miniflux or similar RSS services to subscribe to and fetch feeds but use a client on top that’s native to their device to consume their content.

There are many ways to subscribe to and consume content that I wouldn’t do it justice to only highlight the apps I’ve heard of. Thanks to Robb Knights collection of App Defaults posts, I skimmed to the top 100 entries to tally the top RSS clients and services. Here are some observations:

• By far the most popular RSS client was Reeder which acts as a news aggregator as well, it’s only available for Mac and iOS. Most of the entries that used Reeder also paired it up with syncing through iCloud² between devices with a minority opting for other services such as Feedbin, FreshRSS and Feedly.

• NetNewsWire was the second most popular client also only available for Mac and iOS. This app also supports multiple methods of syncing of which iCloud² was the most popular with a minor choosing Feedbin.

• Feedbin, FreshRSS, and Miniflux were popular choices for RSS services to back readers but some also chose to use them are their primary clients.

Finding RSS feeds

I mostly follow technology-related blogs with news or other organisations. The benefit of using RSS is that it allows you to curate your feed over time. I’d recommend browsing ooh.directory which contains over 2,000 blogs separated by topic. If you find a blogger you like look for others they might link to or if they have a blogroll on their site, which is a list of other bloggers that they like.

Some news agencies also have feeds you can follow, for example, BBC News has a page dedicated to explaining how you to use RSS and the different feeds they provide separated by category.RSS also pops up on social media platforms, each Mastodon profile or tag has an RSS feed³. Adding .rss to the end of the profile or tag URL takes you directly to the feed, or just pasting the link in an RSS app will get the feed for you. The same goes for YouTube channels as well, yes, you can subscribe to new YouTube videos through RSS. You’d have to find the channel ID and enter it into the following URL https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={channel_id}. I’ve created a web service that does that for you.

Fin

This should give you enough information to get started. Have fun!

Update 2024-11-03: Added RSS tag and author to post.

Update 2024-11-24: Corrected assumption on finding YouTube RSS feeds, added link to web service. More details can be found in the Fetching RSS feeds from YouTube post.