I’d like to take my RSS feeds from an aggregator of news to a curated selection of interesting things. Interesting newsletters and blogs are where I think RSS shines, but I struggle to find this content.
What do you do to find these kinds of RSS feeds?
Check out some of these directories:
I didn’t even know that such directories existed. That’s awesome!
With my RSS app (Feeder) I can punch in the URLs of most publications and follow them easily. Not every one is updated though
When I find a website I find interesting, I usually use the firefox addon feedbro to find an rss feed in the site. I create folders based on domains or website type to help categorize things. It has worked for a lot more websites than I expected.
This is how I manage it:
- Usually I add feeds of blogs I find out from other aggregators (people posting links, HackerNews, Lobsters, Kotke.org, etc).
- This website categorizes blogs, I found some really good gems there, so I follow their feed.
- My RSS reader of choice (Inoreader) can show trending topics from feeds I am not following.
For the most part, my RSS habits have been just converting what I read in a webpage into my RSS reader like sports websites, blogs I was interested in, status updates in services, YouTube pages, etc.
To help with anything that doesn’t have a native feed, I set up RSSHub & RSS-Bridge. Still tryna learn a bit about writing my own rules for these for the last few holdouts.
If you’re still not sure where to start, you can also grab a topic from Google News and subscribe to that as an RSS feed (without even setting up a Google account). It can be a bit like drinking from a firehose and might have some things accidentally looped in though.
I generally go to a website and if I like the content, I look for an RSS icon. If I can’t find one, I’ll browse to either [domain]/rss, [domain]/rss.xml, [domain]/feed or [domain]/feed.xml, because most websites that support RSS will have an XML file at that location. This has worked for every site I’ve tried it on so far, except for Genius’ website.
…and to any of the feeds actually contain an article ? or just links back to website, so they get pageview ?
That’s pretty standard behavior of RSS feeds nowadays, unfortunately. It makes sense; if you don’t actually go to their website they don’t make any money from ad views. How else are they supposed to pay the bills?
There are some RSS apps that will actually go and fetch the text from the website for you but that’s usually a subscription service, and it may or may not look pretty depending on how the website is formatted.
not everyone writes for profit
Cool story I guess? Most writers and journalists need to eat.
…wait till you hear about the people that write for a hobby.
Ah yes, so because SOME of them do it for free, that means NONE of them should try to get paid for their valuable time. Makes perfect sense.
Let’s see your list of RSS feeds. How many of them do it for free, and how many expect to be paid?
…how are we supposed to figure out what you find “interesting”?
