RSS - Still Very Useful

I like having a centralized curated list of content. I’d rather go to a single page to catch up on new content instead of visiting or remembering to visit a bunch of different sites. I also don’t like having to deal with cookies and sites tracking my every move.

Intro: FreshRSS and RSSHub with special guest RSSHub-Radar

I used to only use RSS for blogs and other text based content but with the above tools I can RSS-ify most anything.

The Flow of Content

FreshRSS is the rss aggregator and can be used as the reader either on desktop or as a PWA on mobile. I host my own at feeds.fig.systems. It’s got a few slick themes and has options to scrape webpages with x-paths. You provide a URL and use elements to select what you’d like to create your feed from, that’s a lot of work per feed.

That was my first go at RSS-ifying everything until I learned about RSSHub which does the same thing but completely for you. I have my own hosted RSSHub.fig.systems. They provide pre-made “routes” which make turning many common content sources into feeds.

For example I could add the feed rsshub.fig.systems/youtube/user/linustechtips/ to feeds.fig.systems and I’d get a new entry every time that channel had a new feed.

Having to look up the routes can be annoying. Enter RSSHub-Radar, a nice browser extension that can automatically detect and provide the route for a given page you’d like to rss-ify. The extension can also be configured to format the url for whatever rss aggregator you use, FreshRSS or otherwise.

It’s worth going over RSSHub’s routes to get an idea of what can be turned into an rss feed.