RSS Tricks

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Some of my favorite tricks for finding RSS Feeds to follow:

Reddit

Get the feed for the top posts of the month for a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com//r/simpsonsshitposting/top/.rss?t=month (Replace simpsonsshitposting with a subreddit you want to monitor)

This gives you the top posts from the month, so it’s not a firehose of stuff flooding your reader–just about a post a day. The downside is that sometimes you see posts late. This is my number one tip for monitoring noisy subreddits where I don’t want to miss out on the best posts.

YouTube:

You can put any YouTube channel into an RSS reader and should find the feed. This means that you can get the full feed of all the channels you want to follow–no algorithm involved.

Email Newsletters

Kill The Newsletter gives you an email address to use to subscribe to a newsletter. It then creates an RSS feed of emails to that address.

However, in most cases you don’t even need that. Substack and clones have RSS feeds (although they can be disabled by the site owner). Try adding the website of a newsletter to your feed reader and see if it finds a feed.

Web Comics

Most web comics have an RSS feed, often with the comic image embedded in the post. Try adding them to your feed reader.

Mastodon Hashtags

https://mastodon.social/tags/movies.rss (Replace movies with the hashtag you want to follow).

There’s a big overlap between the type of person who would read a blog post about RSS tricks, and the type of person who knows that Mastodon profiles all have RSS feeds. Twitter and Facebook did too, but corporate social media will always close the doors when they’ve captured enough people. However, you may not have known that you can follow topics in RSS as well. Find the hashtag for your city/area and follow it to see what’s being talked about in the Fediverse.

Mastodon Bookmarks

You can get an RSS feed of Mastodon posts you’ve bookmarked at https://bookmark-rss.woodland.cafe/. I use this as a “read it later” service. When I see an interesting link, I bookmark the post, and it shows up later in my RSS feed later.

Podcasts

Literally every podcast is an RSS feed. In fact, if it doesn’t have an RSS feed, I’d argue it’s not a podcast. If you follow a podcast with good show notes, you can read them in your RSS reader.

Lots of Websites

RSS Bridge can scrape a lot of websites and turn them into RSS feeds. Here’s a list of publicly accessible versions or you can try the official RSS Bridge hosted version (start there)

Any Website

If you scroll down on that last RSS Bridge link you’ll find “XPathBridge”. This uses a language called XPath to let you select an element from a web page. You’ll then get a new RSS item whenever that part of the web page changes. Here’s a blog post about using it with FreshRSS but the same principle applies to RSS Bridge.

Wikipedia

You can follow edits on any Wikipedia page to see when it gets changed or updated, the format is https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reddit&action=history&feed=rss

What are some other good uses of RSS feeds?