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Liberate your news with RSS

RSS, standing for Really Simple Syndication, is a really good and easy way to get all your news right onto your computer.

While the standard is fairly old now, being older than me, it still fills its purpose wonderfully.

To have a simple outlook, RSS allows you to get news from feeds made available by websites and aggregate them into a software.

Some good RSS readers include:

Finding RSS feeds is also easy. You can find them by searching online for them or looking for the RSS icon on websites (small dot with the three lines going out like a broadcast).

Some readers like RSSGuard also have a feature to discover RSS feeds on pages.

Some nice feeds I personally watch are:

  • Blender - https://blender.org/feed
  • Resonite - https://store.steampowered.com/feeds/news/app/2519830
  • Acrouzet (YouTube) - https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UClv1kZDpIA9LcXPYY4KTU-w
  • The Servo blog - https://servo.org/blog/feed.xml
  • The Matrix blog - http://matrix.org/blog/feed/
  • Bellingcat - http://www.bellingcat.com/category/news/feed/rdf

Some tricks as well:

  • Any website using Wordpress will have a feed at the URL /feed
  • You can watch updates for any Steam game or app using https://store.steampowered.com/feeds/news/app/<appid> (and replacing <appid> by the ID of the game which you can find in the store URL)
  • If a website doesn't directly offers an RSS feed, you can build one by using something like rss-bridge or RSSHub
  • You can follow any YouTube channel using RSS by using https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channelid>
  • Most blogs also have a RSS feed (don't forget to subscribe to this one to not miss anything in the future :3)

Overall, RSS is an amazing technology, supported by websites you wouldn't even suspect.
I can only encourage using it as it's lightweight, easy, ad-free (at least from the experience I've had from it).

Thoughts? Leave a comment