Feeds

Follow/subscribe (no need to like)

RSS feeds for:

• Here
  • Everything
  • Blog posts
  • Hugo automatically generates RSS/Atom feeds for this site and every section and tag within it.¹ Thanks, Hugo! You can add index.xml to the end of any URL ending with a slash on this site to get the corresponding feed address.
• Elsewhere
  • Mastodon²

What’s a feed?

A web feed³ is a stream, river, or firehose⁴ of content on a whole website, website section, or social profile, (usually) ordered chronologically, which you can follow alongside other feeds in the feed reader of your choice. So, instead of starting your lunch break by opening a web browser and clicking your bookmarks for your twenty favourite websites (not that there’s anything wrong with that), you can open your feed reader to see what those twenty (or 200, or 2,000) sites have posted or updated since your last visit.

If you’re younger than me or spend much of your online life inside corporate walled gardens, you may be thinking of algorithmic feeds, which use opaque, machine-driven formulae to determine what you see on a social media platform. The original web feeds – independent, interoperable, and still thriving – are the opposite of algorithmic feeds: creators decide what goes into their feeds, and you decide which feeds to consume and when.⁵

Learn more About Feeds. (Thanks, Matt!)

Is there an app for that?

You’ll need a feed reader, which could be a (Free/Libre/Open Source, freeware, or paid) software client on your smartphone, tablet, or computer, or a web application hosted on a server that you own and control, or on someone else’s web server (which you might need to pay to use).

About Feeds has a short list of popular feed readers. The Mac Open Web directory has a comprehensive list of feed readers for macOS and iOS.