SuttaCentral
A small technical note: there are actually three xml standards known as “RSS”: RSS 1, 2 and “atom”.
@Snowbird - Thanks so much for starting this thread! I was actually just thinking about making a similar post, as I’m also going all-in on RSS. I plan to implement more robust RSS feeds over at OBU soon and was wondering which standard I should use. Any thoughts? 
Honestly I don’t think it matters, does it? I can’t imagine that any modern reader app cant use all of them. Fine thing to discuss. But for regular users I doubt that it matters.
Ah! It’s a wiki! Please just click edit and make the change.
Folks should be bold in making changes.
Just look for this button at the bottom of the original post. There may be some Discourse “trust level” that allows you to edit, but I’m sure you have it. If someone can’t edit for some reason then of course it’s fine to post.
Since you use Jekyll, it has built-in RSS, and I would just trust that it’s an RSS-compliant-enough standard. If one gets too fussy over super perfect RSS formatting, that would be crazy-making.
Note: my own Jekyll site’s similar RSS feed renders nicely in Thunderbird, where I do my RSS reading. Since Thunderbird likes the RSS format, then I’m happy enough.
I’m using the standard rss plugin (which I believe uses atom) for my blog updates, but I’m planning to write a custom Jekyll plugin to give people the option of getting notified for every new piece of content I add to the library. I had floated the idea before but had punted on it since the community reaction was so luke-warm… but I think it’s the right thing to do so I’m now reconsidering.
Please everyone, feel empowered to make changes to the wiki when you are able.
It seems that the heading links in Discourse get a new link every time someone adds a new header. That’s kind of crap.
That explains why I haven’t seen anything from them in some time.
This is indeed the Achilles heel of the whole rss system. I would bet that most website owners don’t even know that their site has an rss feed. So when big (or even small) changes happen to the build of the website (as in the case of Buddhistdoor) the feed breaks.
That could also be a strength… Several news websites I follow have a paywall or annoying popup ads on their website, but happily give you ad-free access to their articles via RSS. 
That’s true. Over time one gets a sense of what one had better not change on one’s own site, to preserve RSS remaining a consistent experience for the end users. For example, when I make a posting of a new Dhamma Talk, whatever I decide to entitle it, I never change that title in the future. But some typos found down in the content? Sure, I’ll update those, even months later.
There seem to be lots of academic journals that have active feeds:
(all these are added to the list above)
Added DharmaSeed to “Podcasts”. I note that DharmaSeed also allows you to subscribe to individual teachers as well. For example, you can subscribe to Ayya @Santussika Bhikkhuni’s dhamma talks at https://dharmaseed.org/feeds/teacher/553/?max-entries=all.
This is the kind of “advanced” RSS features I’d love to see more sites supporting!
It’s not so uncommon on larger sites, especially WordPress based sites. For example on a Wordpress site you can subscribe to
Same thing is true in Discourse. What is really needed is a better user interface so people are aware of the individual feeds.
Same here. 
This isn’t exactly true. There are lots of web based readers that would be the best option for many people, especially monastics.
Does anyone have experience with any of them?
Also, I was thinking about having a small section for popular non-Buddhist feeds since I think that one way to switch over to the RSS lifestyle is to really go all in. Thoughts?
We also need a section on converting YouTube channels and Facebook groups to RSS feeds. I know some folks are passionately opposed to all those platforms, but using them in an RSS reader is actually one way to break people’s dependence on them as a social media lifestyle.
I’ve tried an RSS->email service and it worked but was full of ads.
Up to you. Personally, I only subscribe to Vox.com and the Bangkok Post these days… everything else was too noisy. … Which is, of course, exactly what the ranked newsfeed was meant to solve 
Right, I forgot about that method, even though I use it!! What service did you try. I use blogtrottr.com. I think my ad blockers are preventing me from seeing the ads. In all fairness, services like this need to have a business model. Sending emails isn’t free.
I mean, that’s the thing about the technology. If you don’t use a mediator like FB, then you have to take responsibility for what you subscribe to. But everything has a filter of some kind. I subscribe to longreads.org and tend to find out about interesting things being published. But what’s the filter being used by them? No perfect solution. But subscribing to feeds does have the big advantage of being able to follow more obscure, very low traffic places and make sure that when they do produce something you find out about it.
But yeah, if you follow the NYT feed, that would be a full time job. Fortunately sites like that often have many different smaller feeds.
Indeed it is. I’ve heard it called “wire tasting” 
Newspapers hire teams of editors to keep up with incoming news from e.g. Reuters and decide which stories to publish.
Do you know of a feed reader with good filtering abilities? Like… only show me posts with x keyword?
Feedbro has exactly this feature. Quite sophisticated. But I don’t know if it works on mobile browsers.
I’m Ok with the idea of seeing postings on Youtube/Facebook through RSS (thereby skipping most or all ads, and other distracting frou frou), but what I’m not a fan of is converting said content into RSS using some third party service.
If the Youtubes and Facebooks of the world staunchly refuse to make their content available by RSS, I’m not wanting to fight against that, because they will probably also seek to confound RSS conversion efforts from time to time, causing subtle, low-level changes which cause breakages at said 3rd party RSS conversion services. Thereby making people hate RSS when it stops working all of a sudden. People will blame RSS, when the blame far more likely rests on the Youtubes ond Facebooks of the world, causing breakages to RSS clingers-on, pulling out the rug from under their feet, as it were.
Please think that scenario through, where blame gets cleverly scraped off, onto one’s “enemies”. This is peak deviousness, IMHO.
If Youtube and Facebook don’t directly and easily support RSS, being jerks, then fine, let them be jerks. I won’t painstakingly even try to “swim upstream”, as it were, trying to overcome their “jerkness”.
Thunderbird has this. 
Once you Subscribe to an RSS feed, then right-click the feed in the left-hand “Folders” pane, then click “Search Messages…” Then a dialog box appears like this:
There are powerful filters you can create, based on things like Subject, Body, Age, etc. You can have more than one filter by pressing the “+” button on the right. Once you’re satisfied, that filtering can be made persistent (creating a so-called “Search Folder”) by pressing the “Save as Search Folder”, see red arrow above.
