Making RSS feeds cool again

Listen, hey. Look. I’m going to assume you’re cool and that you already use RSS, like, religiously. But…

Just in case you’re not, let’s talk about that.

The important part first: Here is Realcool’s RSS feed. But if you need to know what to do with it, read on!

Most websites, and even social media platforms, have RSS feeds. Some very deliberately don’t, however, because they want you to do all your scrolling in their app rather than starting elsewhere. (No surprise, that includes Meta apps.)

But, you’ll find that newer, more user-respecting sites like Bluesky and Mastodon have RSS – and, of course, just about every website and blog in the universe. Youtube does, too!

👇Here’s a great rundown on how Lifehacker journalist Justin Pot uses RSS.

How I Use My RSS Feed for Bluesky and Mastodon

Every Bluesky and Mastodon account offers an RSS feed. This means you can use any of the best RSS readers to follow posts from any specific user. This is an ideal solution if you mostly want to keep up with the posts of a couple people.

What even is RSS?

Basically, it’s a chronological list of the latest content from your fave services – so if you then pop all your RSS feeds into a reader like Feedly, you end up with a feed or an inbox of the latest content from whichever sites and services you subscribe to.

So the idea is that, rather than needing to visit each site to see what’s new, you can just open your favourite RSS app and see it all in whatever order you like.

Depending on how you set your RSS reader up, you can see all your feeds in one place, or you can view them individually, or in folders or collections. Say, a folder for social, a folder for tech news, a folder for politics, and so on.

I’ve been using Feedly pretty consistently (and obsessively) since Google Reader was shut down in 2013. (Rest in peace…)

So, Feedly is the easiest for me to recommend, but there are loads of options out there. Some are platform-specific, so keep that in mind!

The Verge has a good ‘top five’ RSS readers list below.

The top five RSS readers for keeping up with your news feeds

Use one of these RSS apps to read your daily news.

And, of course, Realcool has an RSS feed too.

You’ll find it here – https://dadbase.co/feed/ – but keep in mind that you’ll need to either paste that into your RSS reader or just search for it there. Sadly, clicking on feeds in a browser only displays the coding that makes up the RSS feed.

Alright, get to it. RSS was the past, and now it’s the future!