How to Use RSS

To use RSS, we need two things: an RSS client and the URL of an RSS feed (or of a webpage that declares an RSS feed if we have a client that supports RSS autodiscovery).

An RSS client is like an e-mail client but for RSS. It's an application you install on your PC (or an app for smartphone), that can process RSS feeds. In this tutorial, we'll take a look at the basic workflow of three clients, Vivaldi, Fluent Reader, and RSS Guard, which are both available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, so everybody can follow it. Each of them works a bit different from the other. See [Comparison of RSS Readers] for a more complete list.

Using RSS with Vivaldi

Vivaldi is a web browser with built-in RSS support. Let's starts by learning [How to Subscribe to an RSS Feed in Vivaldi].

When you visit a webpage that supports RSS, you'll see a tiny RSS logo icon in the address bar meaning that you can subscribe to its RSS feed.

If you click on this icon, Vivaldi will show you a list of all RSS feeds declared by the webpage if it declares multiple feeds.

Clicking on "Subscribe" will open a dialog box so you can confirm your subscription and select an update interval. This is important.

Your RSS client, in this case, Vivaldi, will download the RSS feed from the website, and then it will re-download it, over and over again, to check if there are any new posts. This basically a bot that presses F5 for you.

If you're subscribing to a news portal with lots of authors that publishes a new article every twenty minutes, then it makes sense to set this interval to something low so you don't miss anything, but in most cases, if you're subscribing to someone's blog, and they only post once per week, checking once per day is going to be enough.

• How to Decide the Update Frequency of an RSS Feed

Once you subscribe to something in Vivaldi, it shows on your RSS feeds list. You can access it from the side bar or via View -> Panels -> Feeds Panel.

In general, you'll have a list of entries of the feed, which can be blog posts of a blog, articles from a news portal, audio episodes of a podcast, or even newly uploaded videos from Youtube if you decide to use RSS to subscribe to a Youtube channel. Each entry has 4 common components:

1. An entry has a title.
2. An entry has a date.
3. An entry has its own URL.
4. An entry has a piece of content attached to it.

In some cases, the RSS feed of a website contains all the content of the articles. This can be deliberate, with the webmaster being aware of this. However, there are also cases where the owner of the website doesn't know what RSS is, doesn't know that WordPress, which they used to make their website, provides RSS feeds by default, so they have no idea all their content is being published as RSS.

In particular, if a website is monetized with ads, there is no way the webmaster wants people to access the content without seeing the ads. Generating and serving RSS feeds costs money to pay the web servers, writing articles costs money to pay the writers.

Some people think RSS is just an ad blocker, so if a website doesn't put all the content into the RSS feed by mistake, it's not worth it, but that's not how it is. You can just use RSS as a replacement for social media. On social media, it's common for all sorts of websites to publish their new articles as just a link to the article with a short description of what the article is about. This is exactly what RSS can do.

For articles that do have content inside the RSS feed, your RSS client will save that content to your PC, so you'll be able to read those articles even if you're offline. This is just like how an e-mail client works: it saves your e-mails to your PC.

One problem is that certain things, like images, videos, and audio files of podcasts, aren't actually embedded into the RSS feed, but merely referred by their URLs, so your RSS client has to download those images, videos, etc., from the Internet when you open the article to read it.

Using Fluent Reader

Next we'll learn how to add an RSS feed to Fluent Reader. Fluent Reader isn't a web browser, but a separate RSS client. And while it looks pretty nice, it doesn't support RSS autodiscovery, which means it's practically unusable for most people. We're still going to take a look at it as an example.

• How to Add an RSS Feed to Fluent Reader

First we would have to install and open it. Then in the application, click on a cog icon to open the settings.

This would open a dialog, where we would be able to add a URL.

This HAS to be the URL of an RSS feed, which typically ends in /rss. I've written some tutorials about how to find these URLs in case you need them:

• How to Use RSS to Follow a Blog on Tumblr
• How to Use RSS to Subscribe to Search Results on Bing
• How to Use RSS to Subscribe to a Mastodon Account
• How to Use RSS to Subscribe to a Youtube Channel
• How to Use RSS to Subscribe to Subreddits on Reddit

For example, for a Tumblr blog like https://nasa.tumblr.com/, the URL of the feed is https://nasa.tumblr.com/rss.

See [How to Find the RSS Feed URL of a Website] for details.

After adding the URL, we'll be able to see see the posts in Fluent Reader.

Despite its shortcomings, Fluent Reader is one of the few local RSS readers that support thumbnails for articles that include images in their RSS feeds. I do think it feels much nicer if all you want is to casually scroll headlines.

Note: it seems that by default Fluent Reader never refreshes the feeds automatically. You have to set a global update interval on the settings for it to update them automatically.

Using RSS Guard

Next, we'll take a look at RSS Guard, which is probably the best RSS reader I can recommend. It's well-polished and full of settings and features, but because it has so many features, it's a bit confusing how to do certain things.

To begin with, after you install RSS Guard you can't just start adding feeds. You need to create an "account." This is a terrible term to use nowadays. The "account" isn't an online account, it's just a place to place your feeds. RSS Guard is a feed reader that supports direct RSS and syncing with online accounts from various services. So for online services, "account" makes sense, but for local RSS, it's just a bit confusing.

After creating an "account" you can right click on it to "Add a new feed." Then you type a URL and RSS Guard will automatically discover all the feed URLs of the website for you.

In fact, it can discover a bit too much. Any WordPress website ends up having 5 different URLs, even though WordPress only declares 2 URLs in its websites. [Why RSS Guard Adds The Same Feed Repeated Five Times]

Then you select which ones you want to add, and click to fetch, and it will start fetching the articles.

RSS Guard is much better than Fluent Reader in several aspects. It has nested folders. You can tag articles with custom "labels." It has a search box where you can search your feeds, instead of searching only your articles, which means if you have hundreds of feeds, you can easily filter them.

Comparing RSS Guard and Vivaldi, however, is a bit trickier. Although RSS Guard has a lot more features all around, it displays enclosures as links. In RSS, enclosures are used by podcasts, for example, to link to the audio file containing the podcast episode. Some RSS readers, like Liferea (which is Linux-only), display an audio player inside the content area. Vivaldi does this, but RSS Guard does not.

Additionally, Vivaldi can embed Youtube videos if you subscribe to a Youtube channel via RSS in Vivaldi. Youtube videos use a proprietary code to declare what video is associated with each feed entry, and uses the Media RSS extension as a fallback (which dates back to the time of Flash players). Most clients don't support the proprietary code, but it seems Vivaldi does support it, which is pretty awesome.

Using Thunderbird

Finally, we'll take a look at how to add an RSS feed to Thunderbird. This is a horrible, confusing experience, that nobody should ever go through. But Thunderbird does have some pretty advanced features from being a very old e-mail client, and some of this functionality is shared with the RSS side, including filters that are easy to set up, so you can, for example, tell Thunderbird to place all entries that contain some words in one folder, or delete them if they contain words you don't want to ever see.

Although other clients support similar functionality, Thunderbird really makes advanced programmability easy and accessible for everyone. So long as they can figure out how to add a feed.

The first thing we need to do in Thunderbird is to create a "Feed" account. Observe how it does us no favors right from the start. You could have called this "RSS" or "RSS / Feed." But someone just had to say "Feed" so it's extra hard to find.

• How to Set up Thunderbird as an RSS Reader

To do this, click on the hamburger icon on the titlebar, then click on "New Account."

Then click on "Feed."

A dialog will appear for you to give the new account a name, but I suggest leaving it on the default and just clicking "Next" until it finishes.

Then comes the hard part: actually adding a feed.

• How to Add an RSS Feed to Thunderbird

First, you have to create a folder where you want your RSS entries to be stored.

Then, you have to select "Subscribe..." on this folder to attach an RSS feed to it.

Then you have to give Thunderbird the URL of the RSS feed because it doesn't support RSS Autodiscovery.

After you go through all these steps, you can finally use Thunderbird as an RSS reader.

Conclusion

I think you've got a grasp of how RSS works from this tutorial, haven't you? No matter what RSS client you choose, all you have to do is figure out the URL of the RSS feed and then add it to subscribe. Some clients make this process easier than others, but that's essentially what it boils down to.

Once you have figure out how to use a client, it's easy to add more and more feeds as you find them.

Note that most clients provide multiple layouts, so just because an RSS client has three vertical panes in one screenshot, that doesn't mean you can't customize it to have horizontal panes instead. Some of them also support dark theme, changing font size, etc.