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29 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
29 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: "RSS: good and useful"
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description: RSS/Atom are protocols for Internet-based newsletter/feed services. They're surprisingly well-supported and you should consider using them.
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created: 14/05/2022
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---
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RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it's an underappreciated protocol for generally "following" things on the internet.
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Most people do this via proprietary platforms with feed/notification functionality, the problems of which are obvious, or email.
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Email, though, is push-based - you subscribe to a service and it communicates with your email server whenever a new item is published.
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While this allows new content to be received in near-real-time, it has the significant disadvantage that unsubscription can be difficult and nonstandardized, and your address can be used by anyone else to send you unwanted mails.
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RSS inverts this; an RSS reader application periodically checks a list of RSS feeds by downloading them from their servers and displays all new content it finds.
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This makes it a lot easier to manage a lot of feeds or items as an end user, particularly since lots of reader software will also let you categorize feeds to better manage content.
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It's also easier for site admins: because of rampant spam running your own email server (without email from it being immediately discarded) is tricky, so it's generally required to integrate some external, paid service instead.
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RSS only requires serving an XML file, which is very easy to do on top of an existing website, which is probably why it's still pretty widely implemented.
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Yes, despite RSS's relative lack of use nowadays, a surprisingly large amount of sites still support it (some might use Atom, a slightly different protocol, but good reader applications support both transparently):
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* WordPress, a very popular platform for blogs, has RSS support enabled by default (just go to `/feed/`).
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* YouTube has RSS feeds for channels' videos: `https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[ID of channel to follow]`.
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* Some web fiction sites (e.g. Royal Road, Archive Of Our Own) have per-story RSS feeds.
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* osmarks.net has an RSS feed, linked on the main page somewhere: [https://osmarks.net/rss.xml](https://osmarks.net/rss.xml) - this does only cover blog posts and not experiments, as those aren't actually timestamped.
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* Blogspot blogs have feeds at `/rss.xml`.
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* The BBC has RSS feeds described here: [https://www.bbc.com/news/10628494](https://www.bbc.com/news/10628494).
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* Otherwise, you can ctrl+F for "RSS" or "Atom" or "feed" or "subscribe" and might be successful, or try URLs like `/feed`, `/feed.xml`, `/feed.atom`, `/index.xml`, `/rss` or `/rss.xml`.
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As for RSS readers to use these with, there are many implementations available.
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I use [Miniflux](https://miniflux.app/), since it's self-hosted and accessible on multiple devices via the web, and has nice features like keyboard controls, scraping websites which omit some content from RSS feeds, and an integration API which I use to plug it into my convoluted mess of custom scripting.
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The [Awesome Self-Hosted list](https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#feed-readers) has many other reader applications like this.
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If you prefer something which runs locally as a desktop application, [Wikipedia has a list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators) (I haven't actually checked this space myself).
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