On the personal importance of RSS-feeds

Twitter is a constant headache to myself. On one hand it’s an excellent tool to follow a wide variety of sources and it tremendously helps with keeping up to date with the latest news from the world of information security. On the other hand it’s an overwhelming mixture of signal and noise, full of sometimes (to me, that is) arkane social rules and regulations that I’m not equipped to deal with.

I recently stumbled upon a post on Twitter that put feelings I wasn’t aware of into words, in a perfect way:

.. I miss having lots of friends who were extremely online and who all had their own websites and time to chat online, I miss the open Internet being an optimistic future rather than a depressing afterthought ..

Funnily enough that post made me realize that I had entirely forgotten about RSS-feeds. So I went and checked all the pages I was regularly visiting, in order to feed Newsboat with them. I was surprised to learn that very few of my favourite blogs had an RSS-icon, or a link to the feed, anywhere prominently on their page.

After poking around on said sites a little bit I realized that a fair bit of them did in fact provide an RSS-feed, but didn’t advertise them. So for those of you reading this who still run their own blogs, or websites in general: Please. Provide us with an RSS-feed. Let me enjoy a glimpse of nostalgy about a time long gone. And also, let me avoid having to deal with Twitter.

In order to help people with searching for ‘hidden’ RSS-feeds, the following paragraphs contain information on how to locate (and in some cases, how to configure) RSS-feeds for different platforms.

It’s not exhaustive, those are simply the ones I encounter on a regular base. I’m more than happy to extend the list, just send me a message.

  • Ghost seems to try to create an RSS-feed of everything once you add the suffix /rss to it. So the default RSS-feed for your site would be
https://yourdomain.tld/rss
  • Jekyll supports RSS-feeds with the help of the plugin [jekyl-feed](https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-feed).

Simply add the following line to your _config.yml:

plugins:
  - jekyll-feed

Now your feed is available under:

https://yourdomain.tld/feed.xml

Since a lot of people use Jekyll in combination with Github Pages, chances are high that if you encounter a Github Page with an unknown CMS, it’s Jekyll & this link will work.

  • Hugo, according to the documentation, provides an RSS-feed per default, unless you explicitly disable it.
https://yourdomain.tld/index.xml
  • Wordpress generates an RSS-feed of your posts per default, unless you explicitly turn it off.
https://yourdomain.tld/feed
  • Medium automatically provides an RSS-feed, but from what I can gather there’s neither a way to turn it off (if you would feel like doing so) nor do they really tell you about it. You can find it by appending /feed to your personal URL.
https://yourusername.medium.com/feed

I’d also like to use this opportunity to remind everyone reading this that as tempting as using Medium might be, it’s a bad idea to support them by providing them with your content. Among other things they have employed a number of shady business practices in the past (including trying to blackmail a non-profit organisation) and they are tremendously harmful towards your privacy.

Before going on an a boring rant: Other people have written about the issues way more eloquently.

  • Wix.com automatically provides an RSS-feed, however you need to manually edit the template of your site to make it directly visible on your page. Unfortunately I’ve never used Wix myself, so I’m not entirely sure if the RSS-feed is generated per default.
https://yourdomain.tld/blog-feed.xml