What is an RSS Feed?

An RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a feed that can be used to obtain updates from various sources of information, including social media sites such as YouTube. As such, you can keep all your media tabs in one place, removing the need to cycle through all of your social media platforms.

One of the main benefits (or drawbacks, depending on how you look at it) of using this technology in viewing social media is the lack of targeted content or adverts. Targeted content cannot be provided to you in this format, as you are merely viewing the feeds from sources you subscribed to yourself, content you have not subscribed to will not interject itself onto your feed. I believe this is why people spend so much time on their social media pages, due to the ever updating content, using an RSS feed could potentially reduce your time you are viewing social media.

How do I use RSS feeds?

To use an RSS feed, you will need a piece of software called a “RSS Feed Reader”, this will be the platform where you place all the RSS feeds you are interested in. There are a multitude of options for RSS readers, it is ultimately up to you decide which works best for you, but they will all achieve the same goal - viewing RSS feeds, I am not sure what is offered for Windows or mobile but on Linux I use a reader called “newsboat” which is a command line program that is highly customisable.

Once you have chosen your RSS feed reader, you can start to put RSS feeds you want to get updates from into your RSS reader. To start, you can use the RSS feed associated with my website:

https://harrydomanski.com/posts/index.xml

Right clicking this link and clicking “Copy Link Address” will give you the RSS feed source you need to put in your RSS feed reader. Once it is in your reader, you can start receiving updates!

If you clicked on the link it will have taken you to a rather odd looking page with no formatting. This page is in the format of “XML”, XML documents are not designed to be human readable but are more-so designed for a computer to read the document, which is why it works excellently for the purpose of RSS feeds. The generated XML contains important information for your RSS reader to display, such as the title of the post and a short summary of the content. XML documents are not just limited to RSS feeds, they can be used for other services such as databases, but we will not get into that here.

Where do I find RSS feeds?

Dedicated RSS feeds are usually indicated on a site by the following icon:

When you click on this icon on a given page, or the corresponding link, you’ll get sent to the RSS feed, which will usually be in the XML format as shown above. If you want this feed to show up in your RSS reader, you can copy the URL from the address bar on the XML page, or instead of clicking on the RSS link, you can right click and click on the “Copy Link Address” and that will give you the RSS link.

My Favourites Sites Don’t have RSS Feeds!

You would be correct with this assumption, as most big social media platforms do not offer dedicated RSS feeds (that are obvious), however, there are workarouds that can be used to add some social media sites to your RSS feed reader.

The main sites I’ve found workarounds for are Reddit, YouTube and Twitter, allowing you to view these feeds directly in your reader.

Youtube and Reddit have an RSS feed showing content from a particular page, you just need to use a different link to obtain the content. Twitter I’ve found an external website that will put tweets in an RSS feed format for you.

You can achieve this in the following way:

• Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=ChannelID

• Reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/Sub_Reddit_Name.rss

• Twitter

https://nitter.net/UserName/rss

Using those URLs should give a valid entry in your RSS reader given that you have changed the placeholder text into a valid username or ID. When the specified channel uploads new content to their platform, it will update on your reader. Once you’ve added a lot of content to your reader, you’ll have one place where you can view all of the content you are interested in, while being off the platforms.

I can view all of my content already. Why should I use an RSS reader?

It is more convenient to view all of what you are interested in, in one place, without any additional content that you are not subscribed to yourself. Not having other peoples conetnt in your feed is important as this will mean you spend less time consuming media (which is a good thing), you also won’t have the targeted content or adverts that come with using these social media platforms. Scrolling through social media pages is one of the best ways to waste your time, it’s very easy to spend hours just scrolling through as your feed is constantly being updated, sometimes from providers you are not even subscribed to. With this method, you can view the content for what it is and not have external view points as well, which is what social media strives for. You’ll also be able to add to your feed news sources you are interested in as well, outside of the realm of social media - giving more quality content and posts about the subject.

RSS Feeds

Overall, I believe taking the time to perfect your RSS reader to have the content you are interested in a good invetsment of time, as it will allow you have all of your conetnt in one place, removing the need of going through each of the different social media sites you are signed up for (also can prevent mindlessly scrolling on these apps). Having only the content you are subscribed to is also a plus, as you won’t see targeted content towards you as you’re using an external viewer that is not associated with you in anyway.

There are plentiful RSS readers you can use to view this content also, so you can use what best suits your needs and some readers will be highly customisable if that is what you desire. RSS readers give you a lot more control of your content and interface, due to plethora of RSS feeds you can subscribe to and the customisability of some of the readers, allowing you to make them suit your needs. I hope this post gave some insight as to how you could use RSS readers in your own time and as an alternative to social media as a means of obtaining news.