RSS Feeds - Getting Your Damn Updates

I like RSS feeds. There’s a lot of games, programs and the like installed on my computer that don’t feel the need to tell me that there’s an update available for them, and that sucks. Furthermore, every single developer wants their own space to post their updates and/or devlogs; I’m no exception when it comes to that. RSS feeds are a dope way of collating all of those various sources of information into a single place, and I wish more people knew how to use it. I’d also like for more developers to push for RSS feed update support as well, but that’s a wish that will never come true. I digress. 🤷

If you’re interested in building an RSS feed aggregator for yourself (a thingy do-dad that grabs posts from a bunch of links n’ shit), here’s what I use.

RSSOwlnix – A fork of the old RSSOwl client, actively maintained by the community. Most notably supports automated filtering based on keywords and has a notifier that can pop up (like the windows notifications).

Raven Reader – A beautifully-designed RSS client that streamlines the viewing process. Comes with multiple themes (including two dark modes).

Finding good sources for feeds can be tough, especially when the place the developers choose to push their devlogs don’t natively support RSS. Thankfully, a lot of developers do support RSS, and those that don’t have workarounds we can use.

• Blogspot – A lot of indie developers still use blogspot thanks to it’s extremely simple setup and use. Blogspot natively supports RSS for both posts and comments; you can usually find a link to the RSS feed within the page footer.

• itch.io – It isn’t mentioned in the knowledgebase, but Itch did eventually build the ability to view a game’s devlog via RSS. It’s worth noting that the RSS link will kick back an error if they haven’t published anything to the devlog. You can view a game’s RSS feed by including /devlog.rss at the end of the game page’s URL¹.

• Patreon – Patreon, unfortunately, does not support RSS for normal posts. It does have an RSS feed option, but it’s only for audio files (like podcasts). As to why they don’t support all post types, I can’t really say. Thankfully, there’s a workaround: RSS-Bridge, an open-source parser for nearly all webpages. You can find RSS-Bridge projects being hosted all over the place thanks to its easy setup and maintenance, but the one I use is this one. Simply include the Patreon author’s URL ID (the name in the URL after patreon.com/) and click Generate Feed. Voila! Patreon's CloudFlare setup denies access to RSS Bridge now. :(

• Steam – Steam natively supports RSS feeds for every title on their platform. You can find the RSS feed for any steam title by following this guide.

• WordPress – WordPress sites are a dime a dozen. WordPress supports RSS feeds in every release; you can view a wordpress RSS feed simply by adding /feed at the end of the URL.