926: RSS Is NOT Dead  ## Metadata - Author: [[Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats]] - Full Title: 926: RSS Is NOT Dead - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/29c9f44f-809f-4e6b-bb4e-111830cf2d5d ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **RSS Feeds Simplify Content Tracking** - RSS feeds provide a simple way to track new content from multiple websites in one place across devices. - Self-hosted RSS servers like Miniflux handle syncing, marking articles read, and reduce noise from ads or distractions. Transcript: Scott Tolinski With it? What's up with RSS? CJ Reynolds Sure. I think we'll start, we'll take a step back. I'll define what RSS is for anybody, because you probably heard it before. Give a little bit of history and what's out there, and then talk about how I use it. So it stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's really, really simple syndication. And it is a typically you see it as an XML format. And essentially it is just a list of items. Those items could be anything. And any website can publish a feed. And there are a few different types, but typically they're all just grouped into this term of RSS. But RSS was the original standard. There's also Atom feeds. Now there's JSON feeds or JSON web feeds. But pretty much any RSS reader you come across is going to be able to read from any one of these formats. And the idea is a website can expose a feed and basically list what is new newly available on that website or it could even be a history of everything available from that website or that Thing so syntax heart has an rss feed feed.syntax i think that's the url let me try it really quick that's the one and if you go there the rss feed i've spent the most amount of time with i'll Tell you that yeah and so if you go to feed.syntax you will see an XML data. And it is literally information about every single podcast episode from Syntax that has ever happened. And that's one way of having a feed. So some websites might have a feed that only have like the latest articles that have been published on the site in the feed. But our feed literally has every single episode we've ever done. And whenever you're subscribing to a podcast inside of like a podcast app, it's actually typically using that XML feed. And so typically blogs will have an RSS feed because people post new blog posts to that site every now and then. So the feed will list the latest blog post that's been added. Basically, every single news website has an RSS feed because it'll list out the most recent news that has appearing on those websites. Even Reddit has RSS feed. So any subreddit on Reddit, you can actually get as an RSS feed. So basically, it's a way for websites to let everyone else know what information is new and available on their site. And with that, you could just use an app itself. So if you search the app store on iOS or Android for an RSS feed reader, you can just plug in the URL to a website and a lot of these apps will automatically find what their feed is and then You can use it inside of the app. But one of the things I typically want is I want to be able to read from this feed in multiple places. I want to be able to read from it on my desktop. I want to be able to read from it on my phone and I want it to stay in sync. And so that's where an RSS feed reader server can come into play. So are you with me so far, Scott? Any questions, thoughts? Scott Tolinski Questions or thoughts? You said it's typically XML. Is it always XML? CJ Reynolds It's not. So there's another standard called JSON feed. The meta type is application slash feed plus JSON. And it's basically the same thing, but it's just JSON formatted. And so it has an items property with an array. Each item is an object that has like title, URL, content. So yeah, it's similar, but just JSON instead of XML. Scott Tolinski Cool. All right. No, I'm with you. I'm with you. CJ Reynolds One of the things to think about here is, so let's take, for example, the syntax RSS feed. It has literally every episode ever in that feed. And so in order to know like what episodes have I listened to or is an episode new, that's where these apps or these servers come into play because it essentially will just retrieve the Feed on a regular basis. Like I have my server set up to read from these feeds once every hour, but it keeps track of the state in like a local database somewhere. So the first time it gets the feed, all of those are unread items that I haven't seen before. But then the next time it gets the feed, it basically can do a diff to determine what are the new things that are available. And so that's what basically takes this really dumb tech, which is literally just a list of items into something that can potentially give you notifications of new items or keep track Of what has been read versus what has not been read. And so that's why I have a server set up for this, where I can basically put in all the RSS feeds that I want, and it does all the hard work. It's pulling them every hour to pull in what's the new stuff that I haven't seen before. And then when I'm using an app to read from this feed, it's marking them as read so I don't see them again. ([Time 0:02:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1333555a-6571-4b62-9bce-28e31ad3a676)) - **Use RSS with Article Scraping** - Use RSS readers that scrape and fetch article contents to remove ads and present clean text. - This lets you read offline or quickly scan articles without visiting each website individually. Transcript: CJ Reynolds With, first of all, not having dark mode. Second of all, being overrun with ads. Third of all, having to scroll through nonsense to get to the actual contents. So basically, the modern web aggravates me. But one of the cool things about RSS readers and specifically with Miniflux, whenever you add a feed, there's an option in there to fetch article contents. So it will actually do its best to go off and scrape the article and only pull back the meat of the article, which is like the text itself. And that means that I can actually, once I've synced with my server on my mobile phone, I can read offline, or I can read these articles without seeing the ads or without having to go to The websites themselves. Because that's another thing I don't necessarily like doing is like just clicking random URLs to like blogs I've never heard of. My server does the hard work of like pulling down the contents. And then if I want to go off to the blog, I can do that myself. But first I can decide by like reading the contents itself. So that's one of the other nice things about these RSS readers is it makes it super streamlined to be able to read through these articles without having to go to a bunch of websites to actually Look at the contents. ([Time 0:11:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/59b86831-d788-48db-b999-93483be9b6a1)) - **Sync RSS Reading Across Devices** - Use client apps like Cappy Reader (Android) and ReadKit (macOS) to read synced RSS feeds from servers like Miniflux. - Enable "mark as read on scroll" to clean up unread articles automatically across devices. Transcript: CJ Reynolds Feeds in there. It keeps track of them. It basically knows when new articles are published or new news is published on any one of these feeds. On mobile, I use an app called Cappy Reader, like C-A Reader. It's for Android. But the thing about Cappy Reader is it actually interfaces with the Google Feed Reader API. And with Miniflux, there's an extension which can basically make it so that it appears as a Google Feed Reader service to anyone that wants to connect to it. So it's basically like API compatible. So any app that could talk to the Google Feed Reader interface can talk to this Miniflux instance. So I'm using Capireader on my phone. And then on desktop, I'm using an app called ReadKit for macOS. It's actually a paid app. Right now, I'm just using the free version of it. But both of them, I just set up. I pointed to the URL of my server, added my API credentials, which I set up in the integration. And now those two apps can pull in the latest information from the feeds. And they also can mark things as read. Because this is the other thing is you've subscribed to all these feeds, you're getting all these notifications of new articles, you want to silence them somehow, or basically archive Things that you've already read or seen. So both the desktop app that I use in the mobile app that I use, I have a setting which is just mark as read on scroll. So if I scroll past an article, that means the title wasn't interesting enough for me to click on it. And so now it's just marked as red and I'm never going to see that one again. And then when I click into an article, that will also mark it as red. So I'm either using the desktop app or the mobile app, but all of this is syncing back to the server. ([Time 0:12:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/328caebb-cd5c-4fea-a545-1507a7939558)) - **How to Find RSS Feeds** - Find RSS feeds by inspecting website source code for "atom", "rss", or "feed" keywords in HTML. - Many feed readers auto-discover feeds by trying common feed URLs like /feed or /atom.xml. Transcript: CJ Reynolds And my first tip is literally any news website. One thing you can do on or any website in general that has regular updates or regularly posts. One thing you can do is if you view source and then search the HTML for the word atom, A-T that typically will link you to an RSS feed. Or if you just search for feed or search for RSS or search for XML, a lot of times websites will literally have that feed URL in their source. And if you go to it, you can see the kind of updates that they make. So any website or any blog typically is going to have an RSS feed available. The cool thing about Miniflux and a lot of these other servers is if you just put the root URL of the website in, it has an algorithm to go off and try and find the feed URL for a website. So like if you plugged in syntax.fm, it's smart enough to like go grab the source, see if it actually contains RSS or Adam in the response and then figure out what that URL is. Or sometimes it will even try all of the common paths because a lot of times website.com/feed or website.com/Adam.xml. These are like common paths. So it'll go off and figure out where the feed is actually if one exists, and then it'll automatically add it for you. ([Time 0:19:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/523b97ec-8794-4ec6-bc90-566a8131ab75)) - **Many RSS Feeds Are Broken** - Many websites claim to have RSS feeds but their feeds are broken or no longer maintained. - This shows the perception of RSS being dead is sometimes linked to neglected or non-functional feeds. Transcript: CJ Reynolds This kind of gets to the pain point that Wes talked about a while back of like, is RSS dead? I actually have found recently that websites that claim to have RSS don't anymore. Like their RSS functionality broke and they didn't keep track of it. Like, I don't know if this is the case, but Tanner Lindsley, his personal blog, I tried to subscribe to the RSS feed and the RSS feed doesn't exist anymore. I think if you look at- Tanner on blast here. Well, it's just the example that came to mind. Let me see if it's in here. Yeah. Scott Tolinski CJ slams Tanner Lindsley for his broken RSS feed. CJ Reynolds Yeah. If you look in the source for tannerlindsley.com, there is a link with a type of application slash RSS plus XML. It links to slash feed.xml. But if you go there, you get a 404 of this page cannot be found. So I don't know what he's using for his blog or if he disabled the RSS plugin, but it's like a red herring. And he hasn't posted anything since 2023. So it's not that big of a deal. But basically, Miniflux has... I'll talk about this in a second, but I figured out how to get the RSS feeds for a bunch of different people, plugged in like 300 of them into Miniflux. And then it just started reporting all the ones that said they have a feed URL, but then it just returned nothing. ([Time 0:21:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e8f16a37-8c62-4ce4-a8c7-f4d1cb6cba19)) - **Brutalist.report Aggregates News Feeds** - Brutalist.report aggregates recent articles from hundreds of news sites in a simple static website. - It helps discover new content and find the original RSS feeds for those news outlets. Transcript: CJ Reynolds Another way is to go to like literally any news website, but a site that was recommended to me by Ben, who's no longer at Syntax, but we miss him and he's great. Ben Vinegar. Ben Vinegar. Yes. Brutalist.report. I will say if you've listened to this whole episode and now you're turned off to like, I don't want to set up an RSS feed, but maybe you do want like minimalist news, check out Brutalist.report Because this is like the most recent published articles from every single news site across the web. So tech news, political news, science news, gaming news, all this kind of stuff. And it's just a static website with links to all of the most recent articles from all of these news sites. So my suggestion is if you go here to brutalist.report and you see a website that has links that look interesting to you, go to that website and find the RSS feed because that's how Brutalist Report is working. It's literally just pulling in the RSS feed of the most recent articles from every single one of these ([Time 0:22:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/06747ca9-3888-45cd-8466-98dce900ac2b)) - **Avoid Reddit Drama with RSS** - CJ avoids Reddit because it directs users first to comments, which can be toxic before seeing the article. - He prefers direct RSS feeds to get news from the source without the noise of online discussions. Transcript: CJ Reynolds News sites that aren't all tech news, but sometimes they have a specific tech feed. You can tap into just the tech feed for the bbc.com. Instead of every single article being published by BBC, it's a feed of only the ones that are related to tech. Yeah. Scott Tolinski And we were talking about this off camera, but this seems like it would definitely prevent me from doing that thing that I love to do when I read an article is to look at the comments. It's like, bro, why am I doing this? And then you make an account and then you have to be angry in a comment because somebody said something you disagree with. It is such a hard thing to resist. It's such a hard thing to resist. Yes. And I haven't that alone would make me do this. Yeah. CJ Reynolds But this is one of the reasons I started doing this. Like I found myself you might have been listening this whole episode and be like, why don't you just use Reddit? Because Reddit is a link aggregator. But this is exactly why, because I'm scrolling Reddit and the app typically directs you to the comments before it directs you to the article itself. And so then you're seeing people that are commenting on something that maybe they haven't read yet, or you're seeing people that are just like touting nonsense and like that makes my Blood boil. And I just want it out. I don't want to see it anymore. I just want to see the article. I can have my own opinions about it. And if I really want to dig deeper and know what other people are thinking about it, I can potentially find it on Reddit or Hacker News or whatever else. So this is one of the reasons why I did this is because I want to get my news from the source and not have to wait for somebody to submit it to Reddit. ([Time 0:23:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/85594dff-7d8d-4bb9-88a7-63261030659e)) - **Create Custom Subreddit RSS Feeds** - You can get RSS feeds for subreddits by appending ".rss" to the subreddit URL. - Enhance feeds by filtering content or filtering self-posts via serverless functions for better content control. Transcript: CJ Reynolds So if you go to reddit.com/R slash, let's say programming, if you put dot RSS on the end, that will give you back an RSS feed for the most upvoted posts in r slash programming right now. That's fine, but the thing about their RSS feed is the content is literally just the link to the article and the link to the comments. I wanted the articles themselves, so I literally just wrote a little serverless function that pulls in the RSS feed and then re-spits it out with only the links. And then I can also filter out things like self posts or things that I don't want. And then I plug that RSS feed into my feed server. Scott Tolinski And you can just do that, folks. We have the ability. CJ Reynolds Yeah, just write a serverless function. And I mean, I'm hosting it on Dino. It was super simple to be like, fetch this, filter, spit out an RSS feed. ([Time 0:25:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/75e371f8-5252-40f0-91d4-56da456b3bf5)) - **Use Blue Sky to Find Feeds** - Use Blue Sky to find custom domain usernames and then discover their personal blog RSS feeds. - Subscribing to these personal feeds brings content from people you follow directly into your RSS reader. Transcript: CJ Reynolds Last place I'll mention where you can get RSS feeds is from Blue Sky. Now, the reason this is the case is because a lot of people have their personal websites as their username on Blue Sky. So like westboss.com is Wes's username or estolin.sky is username. Yes. And so what I did is I went and I wrote a script to grab all of the people that I'm following, filter it down to people that are just the, or to just their, anybody that has a custom domain set As their username. And then I went off and found any one of those domains that had an RSS feed. So my Miniflux instance is subscribed to like over 300 feeds, but that includes the personal feeds of like the 2000 or so people that I'm following on Blue Sky. And so that was a really easy way to find the blogs and RSS feeds for all the people that I already follow anyways. ([Time 0:26:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7681fcc2-13fe-40c6-8dcd-3598dce2bfbe))