HPR4106: My tribute to feeds

Hacker Public Radio

I will talk about information feeds from web sites delivered to my computer device. I use the term feeds and by that I mean both RSS feeds and Atom feeds, the two feed protocols which are very similar.

I believe it is very likely you as listener to Hacker Public Radio know about feeds. Not unlikely you even know the technical details far better than I do.

Nowadays many of us use feeds very often without thinking of them as feeds, when we subscribe to podcasts.

But feeds have been around for many years. Back in the days, I used feeds for websites I was interested in. But somehow I forgot about it and web browsers stopped to support feed subscriptions.

A year or two ago I started my new journey into feeds. Although it is not so much talk about feeds nowadays, very many web sites have support for feed subscriptions.

To start, at my own personal web site (https://www.hemrin.com/) many of the pages have feeds, typically those that are blog-like pages, and you can subscribe to several feeds on my site.

From Hacker Public Radio I subscribe to a feed for all show comments. So when you write a comment regarding my show today, I will get notified in my feed manager.

I primarily use Thunderbird to manage my feeds. I do not need my feeds to be synced to other devices. I use Thunderbird daily for e-mails and it is therefore very practical and natural for me to use it also for feeds. In addition I use the Feeder app on my Android-based phone for some feeds.

I do not use feeds for web sites I anyway will visit often or that have a lot of news. I would be overwhelmed of feeds. Instead I use feeds for web sites which are not updated so frequently but are sites I want to keep an eye on. But some are updated daily, like from the parliament.

In some cases, feeds are an alternative to subscribe to e-mail notifications and e-mail newsletters.

The beauty with feeds is that I am in charge and without giving out e-mail or anything - the site owner do not know I subscribe. Subscription starts so simple as I type the feed-url into my Thunderbird feed manager. And when I want to end a subscription, I simply delete it.

Furthermore I subscribe to Status pages. I get notifications for example from my internet service provider for their planned and unplanned maintenance.

Several authorities have interesting feeds.

I have feeds from some companies and organizations.

I have feeds from many software developers, for example Thunderbird and Linux Mint.

I have feeds from some journalists and politicians and alike.

I have feeds from persons with competence in various areas I am interested in. And other persons who are interesting for the persons they are and their thoughts.

So, this show is to tell you that I have rediscovered feeds and found them useful for me. Maybe you already use feeds. Maybe this show will inspire you to have a look into feeds as a useful tool for your personal or professional life.