Nathan Kim

a list of RSS and Atom feeds I follow

February 9th, 2023
In this post:
  1. What are RSS feeds?
  2. My own collection

This one’s not really a project, I suppose, but I thought it would be fun to share anyway.

What are RSS feeds?#🠑

RSS (or Atom) feeds are webpages published by blogs, newspapers, magazines, journals, or any other source of content that simply lists the available content on that site. They’re written in a machine-readable way, and programs called RSS readers can digest them relatively easily.

They’re a fun way to keep track of various websites I find interesting. I also feel somewhat of an ethical imperative to use them; RSS feeds encourage a distributed and diverse web compared to the Web 2-style of content production, where massive amounts of content are located on only a few sites. By virtue of the RSS format being completely open, you’re also not limited to a single reader or way to consume content — you can even write your own medium, as I did.

I also feel that publishing a piece of content on your own website takes considerable more effort than pushing out a Tweet or Instagram story, so the content ends up being a bit more long-form and is published less frequently. My hypothesis is that compared to spending time social media or traditional news, following RSS feeds results in following a fewer number of content publishers and consuming a much lower amount of content overall, but each piece of content requires a bit more deliberation and slow reading.

My own collection#🠑

This list is dynamically generated and changes with my RSS reader’s list of sources. It was last updated on May 21st, 2024.

Click any source to expand it and see more details.

Most of my sources are from tech sites; that’s just who I feel is the type to publish blogs with RSS feeds these days.1 In more recent months, I have found a few left-y writers who publish on Substack, which provides RSS feeds. Some of my favorite sites here are naked capitalism, Origins of Our Time, web 3 is going just great, and Yihui Xie’s blog. The first three links write about economics from a critical mostly-leftist perspective; Yihui Xie’s blog was the first blog I really remember reading and definitely full of gems. I’m happy to hear of suggestions or more links.

If any titles or descriptions appear to have an awkward wording, that’s because these were scraped from each RSS Feed’s title and description (or subtitle) properties with only minor modification on my part. In some cases the authors appear to have accepted the defaults given by their hosting platform (e.g. Wordpress or Squarespace). Please excuse the haphazard nature of all of this.

  1. <antirez>
  2. Ahmad Shadeed Blog
  3. AI Snake Oil
  4. American Sociological Review
  5. Annual Review of Sociology
  6. antisocial feed
  7. Ariadne's Space
  8. artemis.sh
  9. Bear Blog Trending Posts
  10. Benevolent Bytes
  11. BIG by Matt Stoller
  12. Bram.us
  13. Carlos Becker
  14. Chidi Williams
  15. cr.yp.to blog
  16. Damn Arbor
  17. Dan Luu
  18. daverupert.com
  19. David Walsh Blog
  20. davidyat.es
  21. Deno
  22. Drew DeVault's blog
  23. Duke University Press News
  24. endtimes.dev
  25. Felix Krause
  26. Fernando Borretti
  27. FlowingData
  28. Go Make Things
  29. Hacker News: Front Page
  30. Harvard University Press Blog
  31. HOLO
  32. Holovaty.com
  33. Huijzer
  34. icyphox
  35. Interconnected
  36. James Sinclair
  37. Jeff Kreeftmeijer
  38. Jim Nielsen’s Blog
  39. Jonas Galvez
  40. Joy of Computing
  41. kieranhealy.org
  42. kottke.org
  43. Loophole Letters Blog
  44. macwright.com
  45. maia blog
  46. Mapping as Process
  47. Michael Stapelbergs Website
  48. misinfo
  49. MIT Technology Review
  50. Molly White
  51. Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog
  52. naked capitalism
  53. New Left Review Sidecar recent posts
  54. New Means
  55. Nina Quinn Eichacker
  56. Nishant Shah
  57. Notes on the Crises
  58. Origins of Our Time
  59. Pat David
  60. Paul Butler's blog
  61. Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
  62. Protocolized
  63. Quakkels.com
  64. Quanta Magazine
  65. samwho.dev
  66. scatterplot
  67. Social Forces Advance Access
  68. Social Networks
  69. Social Science Research
  70. Sociological Methods & Research
  71. Solene'%
  72. Speaking Security
  73. spencer's paradoxes
  74. Stats and R
  75. tandf: Information, Communication & Society
  76. Tania Rascia | RSS Feed
  77. TechCraft
  78. Techdirt
  79. The Fishbowl
  80. The R Blog
  81. The Third Bit
  82. The White Pube
  83. Theory, Culture & Society | Global Public Life
  84. thesephist
  85. Web3 is Going Just Great
  86. Wesley Aptekar-Cassels
  87. What's Left Ypsi
  88. Work, Employment and Society
  89. Xe's Blog
  90. Yihui's Blog on Yihui Xie | 谢益辉
  91. Yorick Peterse

If you’re still here, here’s a tip for any Svelte writers. I knew when I set out to write this post that I wanted to have the list of sites above be loaded dynamically, because I did not want to hard code each site’s information, I wanted the list to update whenever my RSS reader changed its list of sources, and I wanted a bit of interactivity in the list. I also knew that I wanted to load the list of sources server-side and avoid a client-side fetch request. But to do so using the traditional SvelteKit +page.server.ts methods, I need to pass a prop to this blog post, which MDSvex (the most popular way of rendering Svelte-enabled Markdown) doesn’t allow — MDSvex, I believe, doesn’t allow props at all in posts.

So my solution was to have the layout component for my posts handle the data fetch and have the post retrieve it via the Svelte Context API. This strategy also has the benefit of providing a mechanism for any other post to retrieve JSON data, with no additional changes to the layout component, but handle it in its own way. Another way to do this would have been to use Svelte stores, but the Context API allows the data to remain within the component tree.

  1. Yes, I follow Hacker News. Yes, it can be quite cancerous at times. ↩