In this post:
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 December 17th, 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.
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.
- Yes, I follow Hacker News. Yes, it can be quite cancerous at times. ↩