Ask HN: Where do you find your RSS sites? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where do you find your RSS sites?

12 pointspipeline_peak14 comments

I’ve been wanting to use RSS for quite a while, but what always seems to hit me is how vast and unorganized the web has become.

Google search is an absolute joke, how do you find sites to follow?

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Honestly random discovery, sometimes sites that appear here, sometimes things that I come across on other sites.

I remember a while back I searched google for "int03", "cp/m retro bdos" and found a bunch of old-school low-level blogs, to which I subscribed.

But other sites seem to be very well-known and get presented on a few different sites. For example this one is an absolute gem, even though I'm not a gamer:

https://www.filfre.net/

Mostly hacker news. When I like a post, I subscribe to the site's feed. Takes a while to build a good index but it's worth it.

+1 though I often unsubscribe, the best stick around

Exactly this. I subscribe fairly readily whenever I find myself reading something interesting on the web but also unsubscribe quickly if I'm not enjoying the content after a few posts.

The assumption is that every CMS provides a feed on `/feed`, and with a good chunk of the web running on WordPress, which has RSS in the OOBE, you'll find plenty.

For anything that doesn't, I run a scraper to turn its content into an RSS feed that I'll get.

To make finding the feed easier you can use browser extensions that do the RSS auto-discovery protocol. This will use metadata in the website to find the feed with no guessing.

Whatever doesn't have a /feed option, I'll pop the page source and do a quick search for "rss" or "atom" or "index.xml"

The bigger question, in my mind, though, is why some sites don't offer RSS/Atom syndication (or why some choose to disable it)

Why doesn't a site like Feedly immediately convert a blog or podcast url into a feed if I paste it? Or does that feature exist? It's strange that the intermediate process of finding the feed is necessary. I use getrssfeed com

I've been adding to mine over the years at https://datente.com/main.feeds (the list that shows up when you load https://datente.com)

I feel like this should be a pinned question on HN ... seems like it gets asked every couple days :)

Probably the current web is missing of something like DMOZ

I've been trying to figure this out myself, because as you pointed out Google is worse than useless.

I’m not crazy about Feedly but they seem to have a nice library of sites split into categories further than just news.

So my current “solution” is to find whatever it is and paste it into my preferred reader.

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