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 September 23rd, 2023.

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. Dan Luu
  17. daverupert.com
  18. David Walsh Blog
  19. davidyat.es
  20. Deno
  21. Drew DeVault's blog
  22. Duke University Press News
  23. endtimes.dev
  24. Felix Krause
  25. Fernando Borretti
  26. FlowingData
  27. Go Make Things
  28. Hacker News: Front Page
  29. Harvard University Press Blog
  30. HOLO
  31. Holovaty.com
  32. Huijzer
  33. icyphox
  34. Interconnected
  35. James Sinclair
  36. Jeff Kreeftmeijer
  37. Jim Nielsen’s Blog
  38. Jonas Galvez
  39. Joy of Computing
  40. kieranhealy.org
  41. kottke.org
  42. Loophole Letters Blog
  43. macwright.com
  44. maia blog
  45. Mapping as Process
  46. Michael Stapelbergs Website
  47. misinfo
  48. MIT Technology Review
  49. Molly White
  50. Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog
  51. naked capitalism
  52. New Left Review Sidecar recent posts
  53. New Means
  54. Nina Quinn Eichacker
  55. Nishant Shah
  56. Notes on the Crises
  57. Origins of Our Time
  58. Pat David
  59. Paul Butler's blog
  60. Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
  61. Protocolized
  62. Quakkels.com
  63. Quanta Magazine
  64. scatterplot
  65. Social Forces Advance Access
  66. Social Networks
  67. Social Science Research
  68. Sociological Methods & Research
  69. Solene'%
  70. Speaking Security
  71. spencer's paradoxes
  72. Stats and R
  73. tandf: Information, Communication & Society
  74. Tania Rascia | RSS Feed
  75. TechCraft
  76. Techdirt
  77. The Fishbowl
  78. The R Blog
  79. The Third Bit
  80. The White Pube
  81. Theory, Culture & Society | Global Public Life
  82. thesephist
  83. Web3 is Going Just Great
  84. Wesley Aptekar-Cassels
  85. Work, Employment and Society
  86. Xe's Blog
  87. Yihui's Blog on Yihui Xie | 谢益辉
  88. 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. ↩