I first got to know about the existence of RSS feeds back when I was in middle school, but didn’t figure out their appeal and promptly forgot about them.
Fast-forward to around a year ago - I was starting to realize that I was reading way too many interesting tech blogs, so I set out to find a way to aggregate all these updates together. A quick search later, it seemed like RSS feeds were the perfect fit for the job. In fact, it also ended up helping me keep up with research in some niche fields that I was following on arxiv!
So, in terms of link/notification aggregation, RSS feeds have been a life-saver for me.
If this has made you even the slightest bit curious, I would urge you to try it out for yourself.
And it’s pretty simple too - you just need to do the following if you’re on a phone:
- Install any good RSS feed app. I use Feeder, and it’s been working out pretty well for me. If you’re on iOS, you can consider NetNewsWire.
- Copy the link to any RSS feed. It ends in .xml (for example, you can navigate to my blog’s RSS page and copy its link -
this is totally not an excuse to get you to subscribe to my blog). - In the Feeder app, click the three dots, then click on Add Feed, and paste the link there. Then click on search, and you’ll find a search result with my blog. Click on it and click on add feed (the other details are optional and help you customize your reading experience).
If you’re on a desktop machine or a laptop, I recommend using Thunderbird (I have not used any other RSS feed reader since it worked out pretty well). You can set up RSS feeds using the instructions here.
Now that you have set up your RSS feed apps, you can start searching for other blogs to subscribe to - you’ll find that a lot of blogs have this feature. This includes a lot of news websites, both traditional and for niche topics. You can find some of these here (note that this is not the same Feeder as mentioned above).
Some other interesting trivia:
- A lot of things are RSS-ible. RSSHub goes as far as claiming that everything is, and perhaps for good reason - a lot of the routes mentioned on this website seem to claim that it works for everything from YouTube to Twitter. I have not checked those out personally, but maybe they’ll be of interest to others.
- If you like being on top of cutting-edge research like me, you might want to go to arxiv, pick out your favourite fields of research and subscribe to them as per instructions here.
- Feedle is a pretty nice search engine for feeds. If you have certain search terms you want to follow, you can simply query the search engine and it’ll give you both some relevant search results, as well as a feed that you can subscribe to that will get updated any time the search has a new result.