I rely on Really Simple Syndication to do my bidding. RSS allows us to fetch data from blogs or news websites without ever opening a browser. And RSS might seem really antiquated, after all it’s been around for a long time, but it’s used by the internet saavy to navigate the internet without dealing with all bloat that comes viewing a website, with great things like:

  • Google Analytics
  • The Facebook Pixel
  • ads and tracking scripts
  • GDPR Cookie banners
  • Autoplaying video
  • Softpaywalls
  • Useless recommended articles
  • YouTube not notifying you about my videos even if you clicked the bell to get notifications because I know all you are loyal enough to click the bell and enable notifcations??

And so on..

Instead of chasing all of these websites individually or through social media. we’re going to roll with a dedicated, offline RSS feed reader. While more all-in-one applications like Mozilla Thunderbird, Brave, and Microsoft Outlook provide RSS agregators, we should pick a dedicated application meant for this, so you aren’t mentally bogged down by your email or the 150 tabs of waifu art in your browser!

Now Linux and Mac have access to some great RSS feed readers, but literally none of them work on Windows. And I want to pick a solution that works for everyone, no matter what your operating system is.

  • Fluent Reader for Windows or a pure cross-platform experience. Works on Windows, Mac, Linux, $1.99 on iOS and Android (you can get the for free from Github and Test Flight).
  • NetNewsWire for Mac and iOS, minimally built using native Apple APIs and WebKit.
  • Feeder a minimalist RSS feed app for Android, on F-Droid and Play Store that uses Google’s Material design.
  • GNOME Feeds for Linux users who like GTK ecosystem.
  • Newsflash is identical to GNOME Feeds, but moves faster.
  • Akregator for Linux users who like KDE/QT toolkit.
  • Newsboat, a terminal-based feed reader for Mac and Linux. Useful for combining custom scripts with your reading experience.

I’m going to focus more on Fluent Reader. Fluent Reader is a graphical RSS feed reader that protects you first. Unlike many other graphical RSS readers, Fluent Reader also wipes all your cache/cookie data on exit and provides a very nice UI based on Microsoft design language.

To download Fluent Reader, go to their Github page and download it from their releases page. And as per usual, Windows users don’t have nice packages like Homebrew and Flatpak that the Mac and Linux users do.

So the first thing we need to do is add feeds, so let’s go through some quick tidbits:

  1. Some websites will directly advertise an RSS feed. A great example is Krebs on Security, where you will see a “Wi-Fi” looking icon. This icon will soon become your best friend as well websites that list out RSS feeds. Mark Gurman of Bloomberg has his feeds listed on his Bloomberg bio with a hyperlink.
  2. The next way is scanning the source code. If you right-click in your browser and View (page) source, just use a quick Ctrl + F or ⌘ + F to search for .atom, .rss, .xml, or just the word “feed”.
  3. If you know someone uses Wordpress, Wordpress automatically supports RSS feeds. Just add /feed at the end of the base url.
  4. Lots of services support RSS feeds natively, but don’t advertise it: Mastodon, Reddit, and yes YouTube!
  5. Use a site search in your favorite search engine by adding “site:example.com” for the site, especially if it’s hidden away.
  6. If you go to “trafotin.com,” I have an entire section for RSS feeds and I’ve listed my YouTube channel, Odysee, Mastodon, and Twitter. If you’d like to follow my stuff so your boss doesn’t know, add my feeds!

So now you’ve got yourself some feeds, how are we going add them? Keep in mind, this is going to be different for every feed reader, but again, we’re using Fluent Reader, it should work regardless of device.

Click on the gear icon and you’ll immediately be presented with a pop-up that lets you enter in URLs to your RSS feeds. Copy/paste in your feeds and you’ll be ready to go.

You can even add them into groups and any good feed reader will let you do this.

Fluent Reader will also let you filter posts based on language. For example, I don’t want Tesla man close to my brain, I can hide the article.

But the most important aspect of a feed reader is being able to export your data. If you don’t like Fluent Reader, maybe you’re on Mac or Linux, you can create an OPML file, which is a universal way to transport your subscriptions to another feed reader app.

In Fluent Reader, click on the gear you can import or export a feed. As long as you have a copy of your OPML file, you can take this and bring it into another feed reader.