Ode to Rss
The average internetuser nowadays has a plethora of information feeds from many different sites: Youtube subscriptions, their Twitter feed, Subreddits they follow, etc.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a central application to read all of them? This may sound like a pitch for a hot new app, however this is quite the opposite. It’s a reminder of a technology that had the height of its popularity more than 10 years ago.
I’m talking about RSS and ATOM.
What is RSS?
RSS or Rich Site Summary is a so-called “Webfeed” which lets website owners publish updates in a standardized feed format which people can subscribe to, to recieve these updates. The feeds are just XML files that the website owners generate and host as a normal file on their webserver.
Clients subscribe to these feeds via a Feed Reader. This reader periodically downloads every feed file the Client is subscribed to and looks for new entries, which it then may notify the user to.
The beauty of it really is that you can have all websites providing a feed in a single Reader, which gives you full control on how you want to sort your feeds, how often they should be updated, etc. Especially, giving you the option of backing up your feedlist and syncronizing it with different devices.
As you can see from the graph above, RSS has been around quite some time but was never formally defined as a standard. So there was an attempt to properly standardize, modernize and extend RSS in 2007 with the ATOM Publishing Protocol. Which generally fulfills the same purpose as RSS but is an actual Web Standard and has some technical advantages. Though it never overtook RSS in adoption, ATOM being the modern descendant is what should be primarily deployed by website owners since pretty much all modern feed readers support both. So going on I will primarily use RSS as a synonym for both RSS itself and ATOM.
This is an example of such a feed reader for the terminal, called Newsboat, showing the RSS Feed of Hacker News.
In the early 2000s RSS established itself as “the notification system of the internet”. No matter if it was a news site or some personal blog, you could recieve and organize updates all in a central location with this interoperable protocol.
Comparing that to today, where you have X different social feeds to keep up on, all of which require a seperate app and are completely isolated walled gardens not even letting you chronologically sort your feed anymore in order to show you more ads. Given this development many people using the internet today may not be aware of RSS which is why I’m typing this up.
So who even still offers feeds in this ancient format? And how do I use it?
The ancients never die
Suprisingly more services than one would expect provide RSS feeds given its age and decrease in popularity. Of course many personal websites offer one or even several for different categories or sections of the website.
Though also big sites like Youtube, Hacker News, Reddit and more often still offer RSS feeds. While they usually don’t actively link them anywhere anymore since they want you to stay on their site, these feeds still exist! Usually a quick search in your favorite search engine will tell you about them.
While it’s good news that many bigger sites still support RSS, many also don’t or don’t anymore. Twitter for example has ceased providing RSS/ATOM feeds in 2013. And newer services like Instagram simply never had support. What if you wanted to get these services into your reader too?
As I mentioned an RSS feed really is just an XML file containing a list of posts, updates, etc. that the website owner has generated. In cases like Twitter if they themselves don’t generate such a file for accounts there is software that you can host yourself that will do it for you.
That software will periodically scrape a given site, for example a twitter feed, generate the XML file out of it and provide it to you. One such Project is called “RSS-Bride”. It supports many sites and provides a nice GUI for you to manage the feeds. Should it not provide a bridge for a particular site that you want, you can always write your own bridge.
The fact that a project like RSS-Bridge exists and is maintained speaks for RSS to still being very much desired and used.
Choose your Reader
Now that you should have an idea of where RSS comes from, what it can do and who supports it, let’s talk about the Feed Reader. Since RSS is as old as it is there are hundreds of Readers for all Operating Systems and Mobile Platforms to choose from. Every reader has a different set of features so you should just try some out and see what works for you.
My personal recommendation is Newsboat a Free and Open Source Terminal application for Linux, Mac and BSD. You may also be able to get it to run on Windows with the Linux Subsystem but I cannot guarantee success there. If you do manage that, let me know.
Newsboat is highly configurable and thus a great example of what you can do with open protocols and software like this: I use newsboat to handle updates for youtube channels that I care about however I don’t want a dozen of individual youtube feeds drowning out my other non-youtube feeds. So I use “query-feeds”, a feature that allows you to aggregate multiple feeds, that meet a certain criteria, together into one.
#YOUTUBE
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=willunicycleforfood !hidden youtube
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=MandaloreGaming !hidden youtube
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=1veritasium !hidden youtube
#Query Feed
"query:Youtube Subs:tags # \"youtube\""
The links below #YOUTUBE are the RSS feeds of the youtube channels. The “!hidden” and “youtube” are newsboat tags where the first one hides these feeds from the main list and the second one tags them as youtube feeds. The last line defines the query feed which aggregates all 3 feeds into one called “Youtube Subs”. This way I have updates of all my favorite youtube channels cleanly combined into one feed without having to log into youtube.
Another recommendation would be Feeder for Android (via F-Droid) and in terms of self-hosting FreshRSS or NextCloud News if you already have a NextCloud instance. These are applications I used and can personally recommend, there are many many many more. So again, try out one I mentioned or simply search for an “RSS Reader”.
Take the plunge
Now that you have a Reader, you need some feeds to follow. I will name some of the “hidden” feeds I mentioned earlier here to get you started. Otherwise just look out for the logo on the right RSSLogo or any mention of RSS/ATOM on your favorite websites, also maybe ask your search engine if you cant find anything.
Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=USERNAME
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
The USERNAME and CHANNEL_ID refer to the end of the URL of the Youtube channel you’re looking at. Youtube has two formats for channel urls:
For the first, the highlighted part is what you’d substitute USERNAME with, since the url contains “/user/”:
https://www.youtube.com/user/willunicycleforfood
NOTE: This may differ from the “actual” channelname.
In case the channel url has a “/channel/” part instead of “/user/”, use the second RSS url replacing “CHANNEL_ID” with the highlighted potion:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2eYFnB25tmytImy1mTYvhA
https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/.rss
In case of reddit, you can append a “/.rss” as in the example above to any subreddit url and you’ll get the RSS feed for the given subreddit. Other interesting feeds
https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
https://xkcd.com/atom.xml
https://matrix.org/blog/feed
You’re in control
I hope I could make this nowadays lesser known but still highly useful technology a little more familiar to you and maybe convinced you to try it out.
If you yourself have a website, I encourage you to research how to provide an RSS/ATOM feed to your visitors. I’d hate to see this tech die out completely between big social media sites who are utterly hostile towards interoperability.
Thank you for reading this article <3