06 Apr 2025 2 min read

Your own algorithm, rss

Hey pukey,

Hundreds of millions of years ago, before we all let ultra-rich nerds determine everything we see and read every day, websites were all independent of eachother and apps didn’t exist.

If you wanted to check if your favorite website posted any new content lately, you’d have to actually go to the website and check for yourself. We had to walk uphill, barefoot, in the snow, both ways.

Some individuals, including the internet’s own boy, didn’t like the snow. So they created RSS.

RSS is Really Simple (Syndication)

RSS has two parts. Your rss feed reader and a website’s rss feed.

Add a website’s feed to your reader and you have a single place to see the updates on that website.

Add feeds from your preferred news sources, favorite YouTube channels, blogs, bluesky posters, and podcasts; and you’ve created a singe place to find all of the content you want without any of the ads or outside influence.

Getting set up

I don’t like recommending software to anyone, because I don’t suggest anyone download anything, and all software is bad; but in the spirit of getting you started on your RSS adventure I’ll help you out a bit

For iPhones we suggest: RSS News Ticker
For Android we suggest: ???
For Windows we suggest: Fluent
For Linux we suggest: Newsflash

Finding Feeds

Finding an rss feed is usually as simple as doing a search for “Website RSS feed” or “Podcast RSS feed” and looking for a url that ends in .xml, .atom, or .json.

Some websites don’t make their feeds easy to find so you may want to try a rss feed search website like feedsearch.dev

Some websites may not offer feeds at all, use openrss.org to create a feed anyway

A YouTube channel can be added to your feed reader by just visiting their channel page and copy/pasting their channel URL into your feed reader

Starter pack

Maybe your ‘looking for cool stuff’ muscle has atrophied and you need a little help getting started. Here are a few of our favorite feeds you can copy/paste into your reader to get you set up quickly

Add all of these to your feed reader and you’ve essentially imported my algorithm. Mix and match. Build your own. Or just keep using my algorithm and become me. Take over this website, start wearing my clothes, start complaining about everything having AI or a fucking camera on it these days. Fucking video doorbells and camera sunglasses and AI “assistants” and the fucking Nextdoor app. Fucking smart dishwashers and refrigerators with 27” screens. Can’t wait for my front door to have a subscription service. Didn’t pay the bill, can’t go outside this month. Fucking hate it here.

Leave me alone. Go away.

- The Writers

Written without AI, not even spell check.