For some reason, I found myself with a bit of spare time recently so I decided to look again at RSS. I discovered a couple of interesting things which I thought I’d share.
If you don’t know what RSS is, you might want to watch the following video. Think of it like a personalised magazine where the content is brought to you rather than you going to it -
A bit of background information, I became disillusioned with RSS a few years ago when feeds started disappearing and some websites started offering a general feed where they had previously offered specific ones. I don’t think the situation was helped by the emergence of Apple’s and Google’s News apps, which I find offer an underwhelming experience in comparison.
Hidden Feeds
IMPORTANT - When trying to find feeds, don’t use Safari as by default it will ask: ‘Do you want to allow this page to open “News”?’, the only options being to cancel or allow. I ended up using Chrome, which would generate the web address that I needed for my reader.
I found the following articles which explained how to find feeds that might otherwise not be apparent. A lot of websites no longer display links for RSS feeds -
https://www.howtogeek.com/318401/how-to-find-or-create-an-rss-feed-for-any-website/
https://rss.com/blog/find-rss-feed/
For example, there are no details of RSS feeds that I can find on www.the-race.com. My RSS reader shows feeds available for either all of their content or Formula 1, but if I just want Esports coverage, no feed is shown. If I go to their Esports homepage, click on the web address and type feed at the end of it, a list of code is displayed which indicates that there is a separate feed. I then copy that address into my RSS reader.
Also, if you’re viewing the page source to find a feed, as mentioned in one of the articles above, try searching for the Atom or JSON formats as these are alternatives to RSS.
Filtering Feeds
There are ways of creating your own feeds, such as using the feed creator at http://createfeed.fivefilters.org. I was able to get this to work, but it is quite technical to set up and I found it unreliable at listing titles. The free version will list the last five articles of a feed.
If you want to try it, I found the following video which explains how to use it -
An alternative is https://rss.app, but that’s a paid service and their pricing isn’t transparent so I didn’t even try it.
The option I went with is https://siftrss.com. I’ve only been using it for a few days, but so far it has worked flawlessly. It’s free to use and I found it easy to setup. (Ironically the website went down for a short period of time whilst I was typing this!)
For example, one website I was having difficulty with was Engadget. They do have a general RSS feed, but I only wanted to read the reviews. Using SiftRSS, I was able to filter the general feed so that only articles containing the word review in either the title or the link would be displayed in my reader.
I use Feedly to manage my feeds. They also have their own app, but I prefer using the Fiery Feeds app to view them. I find the web mode works well for viewing articles - it allows ads in a way that I find tolerable.
RSS is still an excellent way of viewing articles on the web, but it really shouldn’t be this difficult to set things up.
If you don’t know what RSS is, you might want to watch the following video. Think of it like a personalised magazine where the content is brought to you rather than you going to it -
A bit of background information, I became disillusioned with RSS a few years ago when feeds started disappearing and some websites started offering a general feed where they had previously offered specific ones. I don’t think the situation was helped by the emergence of Apple’s and Google’s News apps, which I find offer an underwhelming experience in comparison.
Hidden Feeds
IMPORTANT - When trying to find feeds, don’t use Safari as by default it will ask: ‘Do you want to allow this page to open “News”?’, the only options being to cancel or allow. I ended up using Chrome, which would generate the web address that I needed for my reader.
I found the following articles which explained how to find feeds that might otherwise not be apparent. A lot of websites no longer display links for RSS feeds -
https://www.howtogeek.com/318401/how-to-find-or-create-an-rss-feed-for-any-website/
https://rss.com/blog/find-rss-feed/
For example, there are no details of RSS feeds that I can find on www.the-race.com. My RSS reader shows feeds available for either all of their content or Formula 1, but if I just want Esports coverage, no feed is shown. If I go to their Esports homepage, click on the web address and type feed at the end of it, a list of code is displayed which indicates that there is a separate feed. I then copy that address into my RSS reader.
Also, if you’re viewing the page source to find a feed, as mentioned in one of the articles above, try searching for the Atom or JSON formats as these are alternatives to RSS.
Filtering Feeds
There are ways of creating your own feeds, such as using the feed creator at http://createfeed.fivefilters.org. I was able to get this to work, but it is quite technical to set up and I found it unreliable at listing titles. The free version will list the last five articles of a feed.
If you want to try it, I found the following video which explains how to use it -
An alternative is https://rss.app, but that’s a paid service and their pricing isn’t transparent so I didn’t even try it.
The option I went with is https://siftrss.com. I’ve only been using it for a few days, but so far it has worked flawlessly. It’s free to use and I found it easy to setup. (Ironically the website went down for a short period of time whilst I was typing this!)
For example, one website I was having difficulty with was Engadget. They do have a general RSS feed, but I only wanted to read the reviews. Using SiftRSS, I was able to filter the general feed so that only articles containing the word review in either the title or the link would be displayed in my reader.
I use Feedly to manage my feeds. They also have their own app, but I prefer using the Fiery Feeds app to view them. I find the web mode works well for viewing articles - it allows ads in a way that I find tolerable.
RSS is still an excellent way of viewing articles on the web, but it really shouldn’t be this difficult to set things up.
