Web Syndication: RSS and Atom Feeds

How to Follow Along

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

Types of Feeds

• I’ve created separate XML feeds for different post types. Choose the ones you’re interested in or subscribe to the Firehose feed to catch mostly everything 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.

Firehose: A combined feed of the following: blogs, pages, weeknotes, notes, replies, RSVPs and photos. (It doesn't include: experiments, books or likes.)

Main: Traditional, long-form blog articles and slash pages. Main (summary-only): This is a lightweight version of Main containing only short summaries with a link to read the full post on the website.

Weeknotes: Casual and less formal weekly reflections.

Microblogs: A combined feed of short-form content: notes, replies, RSVPs and books.

Photos: Snapshots with accompanying text post; an Instagram-replacement. (This is work in progress.)

Likes: Links around the web that I liked.

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Feeds are often cached aggressively, which means you might see stale or outdated content in your reader (as I often make updates after publishing).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 there is 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” or “Follow”. 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 to see all the available feeds.

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 much on my desktop (macOS), so my subscriptions are all on Feeder. I export the .OPML occasionally to update my desktop client, Fluent Reader. Another popular Apple-compatible client is NetNewsWire.

If you’re into self-hosting, there are services like MiniFlux, FreshRSS (which are the main two I keep seeing people recommend). I have MiniFlux running in 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 seems to be .XML based, and Atom and RSS are the most well known formats. Atom is the newer one (released in 2005) compared to its rival, RSS, which was announced in 1999. Both are widely supported with all clients, with RSS having a slight edge in compatibility with older/simpler feed readers.

As a web feed consumer, 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

From 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 are supported by default in Hugo. The original RSS templates included in my old theme had feed validation issues though which I wrote about and made my first contributions to a GitHub project as a result! It was a very nice learning process, but I digress.

What Hugo doesn’t do is automatically output Atom feeds, so I learnt to add my own custom configuration and templates 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 (the validator I prefer to use is the one by RSS Advisory Board).

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 10 section on the homepage.

Thanks for reading and subscribing to my blog,

—Naty