Web Syndication: RSS and Atom Feeds

How to Keep Updated

Thanks a lot for your interest and readership! Copy the link (the image badge) of the feed you want to subscribe to and add it to your feed reader.

Types of Feeds

• Different post types have their own separate XML feeds—choose the ones you’re interested in or subscribe to the Firehose feed to not miss anything I post!
• All feeds provide full-text unless otherwise specified. Full-text means you can read the whole post (i.e. full content, images, most code blocks) within your feed reader app.
• Summary-only feeds are lightweight and contain short summaries of what a post is about, with a link to read the full post on the website.

Firehose: All these feeds combined—everything is included—make up the Firehose!

Main: Traditional, long-form blog articles and pages. Main (summary-only)

Weeknotes: Informal and casual (but sometimes still technical) weekly reflections.

Notes (microblogs): Content that serves as status updates or quick notes on topics of interest. These are often syndicated to my Mastodon account.

Photos: Short-form content where photo(s) provide the main context; an Instagram-replacement.

Note

Feeds are often cached aggressively, which means you might see stale or outdated content in your reader (as I often make updates after publishing). Another reason to visit my site directly is Mermaid diagrams and JavaScript-dependent graphs do not render in feed readers.

Therefore, reading the content on my site directly in your web browser is the best way to see the most up-to-date version.

To learn about web feeds in general and how I use them, read on!

What is Web Syndication

Being able to consume Internet content using a feed reader (aka newsreader or news aggregator client) of your own choosing is a flexible and convenient way of reading digital media. Usually this consists of HTML content from blogs or websites, podcasts are also supported. It is an open standard and allows for people to “keep tabs on” blogs/sites without signing up for another email newsletter or entering centralized services.

How to Add a News Source

To add a source (be it a site you want to follow, a podcast you like to get updates on, etc) into your client so you can get notified when it publishes new content; you first have to locate the source’s feed URL. It can usually be found at the header or footer of a site with an orange logo or terms like “Feed”, “RSS”, “Subscribe”. If it is not obvious, I like to use a free open source tool called RSS Lookup to find the feed of a site.

Tip

To load my feeds automatically in feed readers, you can try typing in https://burgeonlab.com/subscribe and it technically should display all the feeds I have, but each reader is a bit different so it is not that reliable. Visiting this page on a browser would be the best option.

Once you’ve amassed a collection of sources, you can always export the .OPML file for backup or if you want to change clients. This is the list of all the web feeds you subscribed to.

Readers I Personally Use

I mainly read feeds on my phone (Android) and not on my desktop (macOS), so my subscriptions are all on Feeder. I export the .OPML occasionally to update my desktop client—Fluent Reader. Unfortunately it’s deprecated (last update was October 2023), so I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who wants a macOS RSS reader. My recommendation would be NetNewsWire which supports macOS and iOS.

If you’re into self-hosting, there’s quite a few good RSS readers/news aggregators you can consider the likes of MiniFlux, FreshRSS (which are the main two I keep seeing people recommend). I have MiniFlux on a Docker container on my Raspberry Pi 4B DietPi home server, but I never got round setting it up—which is why I’m still relying on single device reading with Feeder.

Feed Formats

The main format of web feeds are .XML based. Atom and RSS formats are the most well known. Atom is the newer/younger one (released in 2005) compared to its rival, RSS, which was announced in 1999, 26 years ago. Both are widely supported with all clients, with RSS having a slight edge in compatibility with older/simpler readers.

As a consumer/reader of feeds, Atom feeds allows for more complex/richer content to be shown, as well as supporting updated timestamps on posts compared to RSS feeds. Whereas the advantages of subscribing to an RSS feed means compatibility is almost always at 100%, but that’s about it. It may have a simpler structure, but as a consumer, I think Atom feeds wins out.

Hugo Integration

As a web dev’s standpoint, I think both has its pros and cons, which is why I decided to integrate both in my Hugo blog. RSS templates was already supported in my theme/Hugo’s backend, despite having validation issues. I actually wrote about fixing my theme’s RSS template and making my first contributions to a GitHub project as a result! It was a very nice learning process, but I digress.

Hugo does not automatically output Atom feeds, so I managed to add my own custom configs and template to output a second feed with full-text instead of just summaries. I have to iron a few small issues still; like post bundle cover images not showing up properly (default blog cover image works). The main features of the Atom feed has been validated and is working well otherwise.

Conclusion

While feeds provide convenience to the reader, as someone who has put in time and effort designing my blog to look “nice” (in my opinion) and work smoothly, I would of course appreciate it immensely if you visit and read my posts on the site directly! I hope offering a full-text feed won’t reduce my site’s visitor count as I do enjoy seeing which posts get more traffic, which in turn gives me ideas as to what to write next; and also to rank my Top 5 section on the home page.

Thanks for reading and subscribing to my blog,

Naty